Aart's Computer Chess Page

Aart got his first chess computer, a Fidelity Electronics Sensory Chess Challenger 8, as a present sometimes around 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, Mediocre Chess, TalkChess Forum, SuperChessEngine, and WBEC Ridderkerk.

BikJump: an UCI Chess Engine

[BIKJUMPLOGO] Aart occassionally 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 or Arena Chess GUI. 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. [CHESS]

Download Bikjump v1.6.1 (unzip the downloaded file in the "Engines" folder and import the executable as UCI chess engine into a graphical chess program):

All source code (pure C so far) of BikJump has been built from the ground up by Aart as a simple after-hours project to gain some experience with chess engine programming. The main features of the engine are listed below. BikJump is being rated at UCI Engine Ligue, RWBC, CCRL, ChessWar, and WB Olympic Games. Version 1.5 ended first (out of 167 engines) in the ChessWar XII promotion group.

The source file of Peter Jennings' famous Microchess ported to the Commodore 64 can be found at Aart's C64 page.

Please note that this page is privately maintained by Aart Bik. LinkedIn