New engines: PsycoChess and Tarrasch Toy Engine

[Ron Murawski]

PsycoChess is a 5 year old sourceforge project (java source only). We need a Jim Ablett compile!
Tarrasch Toy Engine is part of the Tarrasch GUI.
Both engines were discovered by Norbert Raimund Leisner, who also came across the very interesting and active RedQueen project (in the private engine list)

More information, more engine updates, and more chess utility updates with links can be found here:
http://computer-chess.org/forum/

[Norman Schmidt]

Geez,
i'm amazed Ron...

what you've done here is absolutely excellent...

i changed the name of my engine from demon to crimson less than 2 hours ago, and before i could log in here to announce it, your system had already logged and posted it! you obviously have some sort of automatic update mechanism in place?

awesome job...!

Norm

[Ron Murawski]

Geez,
i'm amazed Ron...

what you've done here is absolutely excellent...

i changed the name of my engine from demon to crimson less than 2 hours ago, and before i could log in here to announce it, your system had already logged and posted it! you obviously have some sort of automatic update mechanism in place?

awesome job...!

Norm

Hi Norm,

So far very little of the system is automated. The part that is semi-automated looks at websites (more than 500 of them) and detects changes. Then it pops up a diff, which I look at and decide if the change is meaningful. The 'system' is mostly built on hard work. I usually run the website change-detector only once per day at midnight, but today was so heavy with changes I decided to run it mid-day. And that's when I caught the Demon-to-Crimson name change at *all* of your sites (Crimson, Cyclone, Cyclops, and Alderon).

It's good to get some positive feedback on what I'm doing.

I would also like to publicly thank Norbert Raimund Leisner who has found so many interesting chess websites and who finds time to update Computer-Chess Wiki pages for me!

It's funny: I'm trying to do a total rewrite of Horizon and Norbert keeps emailing me new links and then I get interested enough so another day passes where I'm surfing the web or adding information to the Computer-Chess Wiki instead of coding. But sometimes I work at coding the website to add features or to automate something. There's a couple of web pages I promised to create for some friends and I need to work on that stuff too. But I like the uncertainty of what I will do on any given day.

Best regards,
Ron

[Ron Murawski]

PsycoChess is a 5 year old sourceforge project (java source only). We need a Jim Ablett compile!

More information, more engine updates, and more chess utility updates with links can be found here:
http://computer-chess.org/forum/

Bad news. I just received this information from Jim Ablett:
"I tried compiling PsychoChess a few years back, Couldn't do it. There is a bad bug
in code that prevents compiling the java src into something that works."

Sorry for the false alarm!

Ron

[Olivier Deville]

Hi Ron

I praise your great work !

Some notes on the "private engines" list :

Centurion : seems the project is no longer extant, Mateusz is working on Atak again
Crash Test Dummy is retired (renamed to The Baron)
Platen is by a well known serial cloner, should be removed from the list

More private engines :

- n2 by Ralf Schäfer (Germany) but he is NOT the Ralf Schäfer who wrote Cheetah and is co-author of Spike

- Cheetah by Ralf Schäfer (the other one)

- ApiChess by Max Himam (France). Last version I got is from December 2006.

If you carefully check the list of participants of my Promo tournament, you may find more, I actually don't remember now who is private and who is not

Olivier

[Ron Murawski]

Hi Ron

I praise your great work !

If you carefully check the list of participants of my Promo tournament, you may find more, I actually don't remember now who is private and who is not

Olivier

Hi Olivier,

Without your help the Private Engine List would not have too many engines in it!

I looked through the Promo participants. Did you know that JsBam was replaced by Reger?

I do not recognize the following engines. Is it possible to give each author's name and country?

Carnivor
CS4210
Kishi
Koenig Schwarz
LesserProphet
LittleClara Final
LTK
ProtoJ
Silke Chess
TGiant
TrueNo
Turing
Usurpator
Wombat

Best regards,
Ron

[Olivier Deville]

Hi Ron

I praise your great work !

If you carefully check the list of participants of my Promo tournament, you may find more, I actually don't remember now who is private and who is not

Olivier

Hi Olivier,

Without your help the Private Engine List would not have too many engines in it!

I looked through the Promo participants. Did you know that JsBam was replaced by Reger?

I do not recognize the following engines. Is it possible to give each author's name and country?

Carnivor
CS4210
Kishi
Koenig Schwarz
LesserProphet
LittleClara Final
LTK
ProtoJ
Silke Chess
TGiant
TrueNo
Turing
Usurpator
Wombat

Best regards,
Ron

Carnivor : a winboard engine by Michael Sherwin, author of RomiChess. Carnivor was included in a package that was distributed once. The version I have is not public, Michael fixed some bugs for me.

CS4210 : another name for Tri-OS (http://chess.dubmun.com/index.html)

Kishi : Jim Ablett compiled this engine and posted once about it at CCC.

Koenig Schwarz : a ChessBase engine that comes with older versions of Fritz GUI.

LesserProphet : source available at the Prophet homepage, compiled for me by Andrew Fan.

LittleClara Final : the predecessor of Clarabit.

LTK : another name for iChess.

ProtoJ : Protej (typo)

Silke Chess : UCI engine by Thomas Steinfeld (Germany), was once available for download.

TGiant : a 16bit winboard engine, written by Ferencz Lengyel, a hungarian friend of George Lyapko.

TrueNo : a private winboard engine by Andrew Wagner (USA). No longer developed.

Turing : a free ChessBase engine, based on Alan Turing paper machine.

Usurpator : a private engine by H.G. Muller.

Wombat : a private engine by Thomas McBurney (Australia), author of Kanguruh.

Olivier

[Matthias Gemuh]

PsycoChess is a 5 year old sourceforge project (java source only). We need a Jim Ablett compile!
Tarrasch Toy Engine is part of the Tarrasch GUI.
Both engines were discovered by Norbert Raimund Leisner, who also came across the very interesting and active RedQueen project (in the private engine list)

More information, more engine updates, and more chess utility updates with links can be found here:
http://computer-chess.org/forum/

My firewall blocked a certain action of standalone Tarrasch Toy Engine at console startup.
Engine remained responsive. I quit and deleted it .

Matthias.

[Olivier Deville]

Did you know that JsBam was replaced by Reger?

I finally decided to keep both

Olivier

[Ron Murawski]

My firewall blocked a certain action of standalone Tarrasch Toy Engine at console startup.
Engine remained responsive. I quit and deleted it .

Matthias.

Hi Matthias,

I emailed the author, Bill Forster. Here's what he had to say:


First message:

Please accept my assurances that my software doesn't try to "phone home"! The Tarrasch Toy engine is a very passive, standard C++ windows console program. I have no explanation except that;

1) Your user made some kind of mistake
2) His software made a mistake
3) The Microsoft Visual C++ Express version C Runtime library tries to phone home ?! (hard to believe surely)

I will investigate 3) further in the next couple of days, although I am kind of swamped right now. The Tarrasch GUI and engine have been sitting on the net for a couple of weeks attracting no attention at all. But I posted on the Rybka forum a couple of days ago and since then literally hundreds of people have downloaded the package, which is potentially more than it's ready for right now.

Thanks for showing interest in my code. Let me assure you again I am just a keen hobbyist writing chess code for the love of it and I dislike spyware, malware etc. as much as anyone. Maybe you could post this for me, I am up to my neck in tracking down a problem at the moment.

In the fullness of time Tarrasch will mature sufficiently to go out of Beta status and I will consider opensourcing it as well which should dispell any doubts.

Second message:

Actually thinking this out a bit more, my opensourcing idea was based upon reorganising everything and making it beautiful first (plus significantly strengthening the engine).

But as this sounds serious, and, although the code is in a slightly embarrassing state right, I am prepared to offer the ToyEngine part right now to someone who wnats to scrutinize it and recompile it - it's just a few .cpp and .h files that should compile with any Windows C++ compiler.

Dann? Jim? Matthias?

You can find Bill Forster's email address at his website:
http://www.triplehappy.com/

Ron

[Ron Murawski]

Geez,
i'm amazed Ron...

what you've done here is absolutely excellent...

i changed the name of my engine from demon to crimson less than 2 hours ago, and before i could log in here to announce it, your system had already logged and posted it!

awesome job...!

Norm

And now Crimson 1.0 is publicly available!

Ron

[Guenther Simon]

Geez,
i'm amazed Ron...

what you've done here is absolutely excellent...

i changed the name of my engine from demon to crimson less than 2 hours ago, and before i could log in here to announce it, your system had already logged and posted it!

awesome job...!

Norm

And now Crimson 1.0 is publicly available!

Ron

Well, I thought it would be released with source code after all what happened before?

Guenther

[Olivier Deville]

Geez,
i'm amazed Ron...

what you've done here is absolutely excellent...

i changed the name of my engine from demon to crimson less than 2 hours ago, and before i could log in here to announce it, your system had already logged and posted it!

awesome job...!

Norm

And now Crimson 1.0 is publicly available!

Ron

Well, I thought it would be released with source code after all what happened before?

Guenther

Hi Guenther

I can see the source, maybe it was not available a few hours ago.

Olivier

[Matthias Gemuh]

PsycoChess is a 5 year old sourceforge project (java source only). We need a Jim Ablett compile!
Tarrasch Toy Engine is part of the Tarrasch GUI.
Both engines were discovered by Norbert Raimund Leisner, who also came across the very interesting and active RedQueen project (in the private engine list)

More information, more engine updates, and more chess utility updates with links can be found here:
http://computer-chess.org/forum/

My firewall blocked a certain action of standalone Tarrasch Toy Engine at console startup.
Engine remained responsive. I quit and deleted it .

Matthias.

Bill Forster has sent me the source code of Tarrasch Toy Engine and I can say from my own compilation that the engine is clean. In fact, I could not reproduce the firewall trigger with the downloaded engine !!
The engine sends its move twice. If a GUI can cope with that, the engine runs fine.
I have apologized to Bill for casting doubts on his engine.

Matthias.

[Olivier Deville]

Geez,
i'm amazed Ron...

what you've done here is absolutely excellent...

i changed the name of my engine from demon to crimson less than 2 hours ago, and before i could log in here to announce it, your system had already logged and posted it!

awesome job...!

Norm

And now Crimson 1.0 is publicly available!

Ron

Well, I thought it would be released with source code after all what happened before?

Guenther

As pointed out by several people, the source code is from version 0.2...

Norm, in your case I think releasing the last source is mandatory, otherwise no serious tester will accept your engine.

Olivier

[Guenther Simon]

As pointed out by several people, the source code is from version 0.2...

Norm, in your case I think releasing the last source is mandatory, otherwise no serious tester will accept your engine.

Olivier

Thanks Olivier, that was exactly my thought too.
OTH I still had no time looking at the source of version 0.2.

Guenther

[Bill Forster]

Sorry, this is my first post here and I can't quite work out how to reply to Mattias's post. I just thought as the author of the Tarrasch Chess Engine I would post and indicate that there are no hard feelings. Mattias has provided me with some detailed diagnostics that will help make my engine more compatible with a range of GUIs.

The Tarrasch toy engine was really written just as a companion to the Tarrasch chess GUI which is the senior half of the project. Still it is quite nice to have an engine, and I plan to enhance it and make it stronger over time. I have not really done much mix and match testing and I plan to do that soon and ensure that the Tarrasch GUI works with a broad spectrum of UCI engines and that the Tarrasch toy engine works with a broad spectrum of GUIs. You can read more about the Tarrasch project on the Rybka forum where I announced it a few days ago.

Thanks to Ron for alerting me to the problem report here and giving me the chance to clear my name.

Bill.