BikJump
BikJump,
an UCI chess engine written in C++ by Aart Bik. All 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.
Features
- UCI compliant chess engine (runs in e.g. Chessbase Fritz, Chess for Android, or Arena GUI).
- Iterative deepening with alpha-beta pruning and quiescent search.
- Transposition table, null move pruning, and tactical extensions.
- Ability to query Nalimov Endgame Tablebases (3,4,5,6-piece) during search.
Java Version
A derived Java version is used as built-in engine in Chess for Android and Chess for Glass. This application also supports the Universal Chess Interface (UCI) and the Chess Engine Communication Protocol to allow users to play against more powerful third party engines or even play tournaments between engines.
Platforms
BikJump is available for the following platforms:
History and Future Plans
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), based on a bitboard representation, was released in November, 2008. Aart now has started work on "Deep" BikJump, featuring multi-threading to perform the search in parallel (commonly referred to as SMP support). Upcoming versions will be designated with the suffix P (e.g. v2.1P) to denote this new parallel support.
