Crafty
Crafty is a free chess program from Robert Hyatt , an American computer scientist. It is able to win games against human grandmasters , especially in blitz chess . In November 2006 Crafty, Version 18.12 on AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz, was ranked 36th in the SSDF ranking with a rating of 2616.
It has been continuously developed since 1994. His predecessor Cray Blitz won the world computer chess championships in 1983 and 1986. The program code is portable , so Crafty runs on Linux and Microsoft Windows . The program uses the XBoard protocol and can be used with appropriate chess frontends . The current version is 25.2.
At the 2004 computer world championship, Crafty took fourth place in the 19.15 version, tied with Fritz 8 , behind Junior 8 as world champion and Shredder 8 . A year later, Crafty ranked fifth out of twelve participating programs. It ran on an AMD Opteron system with four processors and evaluated over 16 million positions per second.
The program plays almost continuously in the Internet Chess Club against humans and other chess programs. The results are used to identify weaknesses and to continuously improve the program. In recent years, however, there has been no significant increase in playing strength. One speaks therefore of the Crafty threshold : Chess programs that are stronger than Crafty belong at least to an extended top class. The current focus of development is parallelization .
The source code of Crafty is available, the use of the source code and the program but is limited by the license. Crafty is therefore not free software and does not meet the open source definition. The source code is used by many programmers as a template for the implementation of basic functions, which is why there have been allegations of plagiarism at computer chess tournaments.
Crafty is one of the programs that are included in the SPEC CPU benchmark test. It is also included in Fritz as an additional chess engine and in this version even supports the multivariate analysis mode.
Technical details
Crafty is written in ANSI-C and assembler routines. There are optimized versions for different platforms .
Crafty uses a bitboard data structure for the playing field, numerous alpha-beta search optimization techniques such as pruning, killer heuristics, Quiescent search and zero move search, as well as hash tables . In the endgame, Crafty can use endgame databases . The software offers many configuration options for the user via adjustable parameters.
swell
- ↑ Instructions (English)
Web links
- Homepage (English)