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| Image from Google is NOT mine |
Download link
Please don't mirror the download link, just send it to this page!!
I'm sure that this engine is not bug free!!
Any bug report will be appreciated!!
No 32-bits plan because I don't have 32-bits systems to test it
With popcnt enabled and without it
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| Files hosted on Mediafire |
03/11/2016 Update!
Added macOS binaries
The zip file contains binaries for:
| Operating system | Compiled with |
|---|---|
| Windows | MSVC 2013 |
| GNU/Linux | gcc 6.1.2 |
| macOS | gcc 4.2.1 LLVM 8.0.0 |
A little story
I discovered the chess engine world in ~2010, I'm self-taught programmer, I started programming in ~2000, Visual Basic 6.0 ☻, then ASP, PHP, C#, C/C++, not much about C++
Since 2013 I started "programming" a chess engine, watching the youtube videos: Chess Engine In C a chess engine called Vice (Video Instructional Chess Engine) from BlueFeverSoft
After that I just modified the Vice to play "better", but never released
Tests
This is the very first version and it's weak, can't even win against Pigeon 1.5.0, so I think it's like ~1500 ELO
I have tested others weak engines but there were not 100% functional, the only one that worked fine was Pigeon developed by Stuart Riffle
Programming language
Skiull it's developed in C99 and it's almost a total rewrite, "almost" because shares little things from Vice that I will improve later...
Features
- Implements the UCI protocol that I also took from Vice with some minors improvements
- Just a plain vanilla alphabeta search, no extensions, no reductions, no killers, no history moves... no nothing
- No transposition table
- Quiescence search, I don't qsearch when in check, I skip all moves that gives checks in qsearch, and recently discovered that suffers search explosion with this posistion: r4rk1/1ppqbpp1/2npbn1p/4p3/p1P1P3/3PBN2/PP1NBPPP/2RQ1RK1 w - - 0 1, as you can see it takes some time to show the pv and spent too much time in qsearch, look the qnodes and nodes
- Very basic eval, just the PST from CPW and nothing more
- Magic moves from Pradu Kannan (I'm trying to do one by myself)
Bitboard move generator, the one that is implemented in Sungorus or called Kindergarten bitboard(sorry I was confused with the term, it implements magic move generator)- MakeMove and UnmakeMove are exactly from Vice but with bitboards, I will try to improve this
- The move encode are also from Sungorus:
I know I can improve this#define ENCODE_MT(mt, to, fr) ((mt) << 12 | (to) << 6 | (fr)) - In the pv only print the root move
- Same time management as Vice
Non UCI standard commands
When you start Skiull, it will be in "console" mode you can type:
perftsuite [depth]
Default depth it's 6
The file: my_perftsuite.epd should be in the same directory as Skiull, you can download it from here
perftrookie [depth]
Default depth it's 6
The file: perft-random.epd, like 6000+ positions (Copyright (C) 2007, 2008 by Marcel van Kervinck, thanks Marcel) should be in the same directory as Skiull, you can download it from here
divide [depth] [fen]
Default depth it's 6
Default fen is startpos
perft [depth] [fen]
Default depth it's 6
Default fen is startpos
Chess GUIs
Skiull is a console program, so I recommend to play with a chess GUI like
Where comes the name?
The name Skiull comes from putting together Skill and Skull, a skull with skills? maybe... but not like Ghost Rider... bad movie
Many thanks to..
- Vice, the guy that no one knows the name but I refer him as BlueFever, many thanks to him, without those videos tutorials I will no be releasing Skiull today!
- Chess Computer Community on talkchess.com, Robert Hyatt, Ronald de Man, Gerd Issenberg [....]
- CPW https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com
- Pablo Vasquez programmer of Sungorus
- Jeffrey An and Michael An programmers of Laser
- Pawel Koziol programmer of Rodent and CPW engine
- Ed Schroder programmer of Rebel
- Jon Dart programmer of Arasan
- many many others....
