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
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.
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.
- UCI compliant chess engine (tested in Fritz and Arena).
- Iterative deepening with alpha-beta pruning and quiescent search.
- Transposition table, aspiration window,
null move pruning, and hash/killer-move heuristics,
principal variation search,
late move reduction, and selective search depth.
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.