Merlin

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Disney's version of Merlin [1] [2]

Merlin,
a computer chess program developed in the late 70s and early 80s by four students from Vienna University of Technology, Hermann Kaindl, Helmut Horacek, Marcus Wagner and Roland Schreier, supported by project supervisor Werner Schimanovich. Merlin competed at various ACM North American Computer Chess Championships and two World Computer Chess Championships in the 80s, the WCCC 1983 in New York and WCCC 1989 in Edmonton, at the WCCC running on IBM 370 compliant Siemens 7.890 F (1983) and IBM 3090 (1989) [3]. It won the International Computer Chess Tournament 1984 in Baarn, The Netherlands [4].

Internals

As mentioned in Werner DePauli-Schimanovich's 2006 book Europolis 6 [5] and the reprinted paper Das Schachprogramm Merlin ... by Helmut Horacek and Marcus Wagner [6], Merlin was initially based on the didactic program Chess 0.5 by Larry Atkin and Peter W. Frey, as published 1978 in Byte Magazine, also written in Pascal [7] except some time critical, often called routines, which were re-written in CDC assembly by Wagner. Merlin was basically a brute-force depth-first searcher with knowledge-based selectivity [8] , using extensions as well as null move to determine threats [9] .

See also

Namesakes

Publications

External Links

References

  1. Merlin image from Disney Wiki
  2. The Merlin character from The Sword in the Stone, the 1963 Disney film, was eponym of the programs name
  3. Merlin's ICGA Tournaments
  4. Jaap van Oosterwijk Bruyn (1984). International Computer-Chess Tournament in the Netherlands. ICCA Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2
  5. Werner DePauli-Schimanovich (2006). Europolis 6. Informatik für Spiele und Verkehr. Extension der Mengenlehre, Herausgeber: Franz Pichler, Universitätsverlag Rudolf Trauner, ISBN 978-3-85487-946-6, (SG7) Merlin (ein ComputerChess-Programm) s. 171 (German), Google Books
  6. Helmut Horacek, Marcus Wagner (1981). Das Schachprogramm Merlin, Verbesserung von Laufzeit-Effizient, Eröffnungsbibliothek und Bewertungsfunktion. 4. Tagung "Berichte aus Informatik-Instituten" (German)
  7. The 6th World Computer Chess Championship, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, pdf from The Computer History Museum
  8. Hermann Kaindl, Helmut Horacek, Marcus Wagner (1986). Selective Search versus Brute Force. ICCA Journal, Vol. 9, No. 3
  9. Hermann Kaindl (1983). Searching to Variable Depth in Computer Chess. Proceedings of IJCAI 83, pp. 760-762. Karlsruhe. pdf
  10. Treebeard - A new way to do Chess - AI Factory newsletter article Summer 2005, mentions Merlin and Rasputin
  11. Merlin Chess Engine
  12. reprinted in Werner DePauli-Schimanovich (2006). Europolis 6. Informatik für Spiele und Verkehr. Extension der Mengenlehre, Herausgeber: Franz Pichler, Universitätsverlag Rudolf Trauner, ISBN 978-3-85487-946-6, (SG7) Merlin (ein ComputerChess-Programm) s. 171 (German)

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