Aart's Computer Chess Page

Aart Bik got his first chess computer, a Fidelity Electronics Sensory Chess Challenger 8, in 1981. Since then, he has been fascinated by how computers play chess. Excellent resources related to computer chess programming can be found, for example, in David Levy's Computer Chess Compendium, and on the web at Chess Programming Wiki, Prof. Hyatt's website, CCRL Forum, ExactaChess, Le Fou Numérique, TalkChess Forum, Winboard Forum, WBEC Ridderkerk, RWBC, ChessWar, and WB Olympic Games.

Ongoing thoughts related to chess programming can be found at Aart's blog. Private test games are broadcasted here. Source code of Peter Jennings' famous Microchess ported to the Commodore 64 can be found at Aart's C64 page.

UCI Chess Engine: BikJump

[BIKJUMPLOGO] Aart occasionally works on his UCI chess engine, called BikJump, where UCI stands for Universal Chess Interface. This protocol was designed by Stefan Meyer-Kahlen and Rudolf Huber to define an open interface between a chess engine and a graphical chess program, such as ChessBase Fritz, Arena Chess GUI, or Sigma Chess. This approach allows aspirant chess programmers to focus merely on writing the chess engine, leaving details such as graphical board setup and play, clock and notation display, and even opening book and endgame tablebases play (if desired) to the graphical chess program. The UCI specifications can be downloaded from Shredder Computer Chess.

Downloads of BikJump v2.01 for various platforms (unzip the downloaded file in the "Engines" folder and import the executable as UCI chess engine; detailed instructions are given at Chessbase Cafe):

All C++ source code of BikJump (except the probing and decompression code for the endgame tablebases, which are used with kind permission of Eugene Nalimov and Andrew Kadatch) has been built from the ground up by Aart as a simple after-hours project to gain some experience with chess engine programming and experiment with new ideas. The main features of the engine are listed below.

History and Future Plans for BikJump

BikJump was first released in January, 2007. The first generation (v1.x) was based on a mailbox representation, and over time increased in strength from about 1750 to 2000 RUEL. The second and current generation (v2.x), released in November 2008, is based on a bitboard representation. Aart now has started work on "Deep" BikJump, featuring multi-threading to perform the search in parallel (commonly referred to as SMP support). Upcoming version will be designated with the suffix P (e.g. v2.1P) to denote this new parallel support.

Chess for Android

[Icon] Chess for Android is a simple standalone chess application that is available for free at the Android Market. It consists of a chess engine (a Java version derived from the C++ engine BikJump) together with a GUI. More information can be found at Aart's Android page.
Please note that this page is privately maintained by Aart Bik. LinkedIn