Thinker

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Thinker, a chess engine from the Chess Thinker collection of programs that include a Windows UI (Thinkerboard), a Pocket PC ICS client (Pocket PC Thinkerboard) and a Book engine (BookThinker). Thinker was initially developed by Lance Perkins as private engine with an own GUI, who submitted the Chess Engine Communication Protocol compliant Thinker to Leo Dijksman's tournament. Since 2004, Thinker regularly participated at CCT Tournaments, since 2008 at ACCA Americas' Computer Chess Championship. In 2009, the development of Thinker 5.x was assumed by Kerwin Medina, while Lance Perkins was/is still involved in development of the Chess Thinker collection, to port Thinker for Pocket PC and the Nintendo DS. In 2010, already under the aegis and lonesome authorship of Kerwin Medina, Thinker played the WCSC 2010 and at the same time the WCCC 2010, where it became third, and was declared joint champion along with Rondo after the disqualification of Rybka by the ICGA in June 2011. Further, Thinker won the ACCA 2010 and the ACCA 2011. Thinker utilize bitboards and is written in C++. Its class design disallows to output any infos while thinking during game play.

=Complaints= ICGA President David Levy, May 09, 2014 The ICGA has received formal complaints against the Chess programs LOOP and THINKER, both of which have participated in the World Computer Chess Championship. LOOP was entered by Fritz Reul into the 2007 WCCC in Amsterdam. THINKER was entered into the 2010 WCCC in Kanazawa. ... Here we present extracts from the first section of each of Mark Watkins reports. ... Thinker “The versions examined here are Thinker 5.4d Inert (March 2009), and Thinker 5.5.4, entered into Leo Dijksman’s WBEC tournament in January 2011. The first appears to derive from Strelka 2 (thus Rybka 1, and relating to Fruit 2.1). The second appears to derive from IvanHoe (thus partially Rybka 3).” ... Based on the above mentioned reports by Mark Watkins the ICGA is convinced that, at the very least, both Fritz Reul and Kerwin Medina have a case to answer. Depending on how Reul and/or Medina respond to these allegations the ICGA might decide to conduct further investigations and/or take some form of strong sanctioning action against the programmers. However, the ICGA does not intend to proceed further along the route to strong sanctions for the time being, in order to give these programmers more time in which to make contact with the ICGA President and present their defence to the allegations. If either or both of these programmers fail to do so by December 31st 2014, or refuses to do so, the ICGA will disqualify them from all their results in ICGA events. In the meantime the ICGA has decided to suspend both Fritz Reul and Kerwin Medina from participation in all ICGA events until such time as they have made contact and offered a defence.

=See also=
 * Rodin

=Forum Posts=
 * ThinkerTalk at ICC and FICS by Lance Perkins, CCC, March 01, 2008
 * Pocket PC Thinkerboard update by Lance Perkins, CCC, April 04, 2008
 * Thinker-ing mobile and parallel by Lance Perkins, CCC, August 08, 2008
 * A different 'Talk' this time by Lance Perkins, CCC, September 02, 2008
 * Thinker output by Matthias Gemuh, CCC, March 22, 2009
 * Thinker is blowing my mind by Dann Corbit, CCC, March 25, 2011
 * Complaints against the Chess programs LOOP and THINKER by Harvey Williamson, Hiarcs Forum, May 12, 2014
 * Complaints against the Chess programs LOOP and THINKER by Harvey Williamson, CCC, May 14, 2014

=External Links=

Chess Engine

 * Thinker's ICGA Tournaments
 * Chess Thinker - Home (archived GeoCities site)
 * Engine Download List from Ron Murawski's Computer-Chess Wiki
 * Arena Chess GUI 3.0 - Archive 8 - Message 118 - Interview with the programmer of Thinker, Lance Perkins (Canada) by Frank Quisinsky, April 27, 2005
 * Allegations against two more Chess Engines – The LOOP Program by David Levy, ICGA President, May 22, 2012 » Loop
 * Complaints against the Chess programs LOOP and THINKER by David Levy, ICGA President, May 9, 2014

Misc

 * The Thinker from Wikipedia
 * The Gates of Hell from Wikipedia
 * Category:Le Penseur - Wikimedia Commons

=References= Up one Level