RofChade

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RofChade, (rofChade) an UCI compliant chess engine by Ronald Friederich, written in C++. While its over the board tournament debut already occured at the PT 53 in Spring 2018, RofChade was first released in August 2018. However, the program's name was already established after the author made first attempts in chess programming in the 90s, combining his initials and rochade, the Dutch term for castling. Despite initially using a tapered eval of middlegame and endgame material and asymmetrical piece-square tables only, albeit Texel tuned and along with a sophisticated parallel search, RofChade 1.0 nevertheless already played in the 2700+ Elo range. RofChade 2.0 in December 2018, came with an improved evaluation considering pawn structure and king safety.

=Tournament Play= RofChade had its over the board tournament debut at the PT 53 CSVN Programmers Tournament, and further played the PT 54, the PT 55 (2nd behind Komodo), and won the PT 56. Online, at the WCRCC 2018, RofChade won versus Chiron and Komodo in the regular rounds, and all three programs finished with 8½/11 so that a playoff was neccessary to decide about the winner, where finally the commercial program succeeded with RofChade strong third. Since February 2019 at TCEC Season 14, RofChade successfully plays at TCEC, promoting to the First Division.

=Photos & Games= PT 54 round 7, Jonny vs. RofChade operated by their authors Johannes Zwanzger and Ronald Friederich [Event "CSVN PT 54"] [Site "Leiden"] [Date "2018.12.02"] [Round "7"] [White "Jonny"] [Black "Rofchade"] [Result "1/2-1/2"] [ECO "E00"] [EventDate "2018.12.02"]

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 d5 4.g3 Bb4+ 5.Bd2 Be7 6.Bg2 Nbd7 7.O-O O-O 8.Qb3 c6 9.Bf4 a5 10.Rd1 Nh5 11.Bd2 Nhf6 12.Nc3 a4 13.Nxa4 dxc4 14.Qc2 b5 15.Nc3 Qb6 16.a4 b4 17.Ne4 Nxe4 18.Qxe4 Ra5 19.Be3 Qa6 20.Rdc1 Rxa4 21.Rxa4 Qxa4 22.Nd2 Ba6 23.Qxc6 Bb5 24.Qc7 Qa6 25.Bb7 Qb6 26.Bf4 Qa7 27.Nxc4 Bd8 28.Qc8 Bf6 29.Qc7 Bd8 30.Qc8 Bf6 31.Qc7 Bd8 1/2-1/2

=Features=

Board Representation

 * Bitboards
 * Staged Move Generation

Search

 * Lazy SMP
 * Iterative Deepening
 * Aspiration Windows
 * Principal Variation Search
 * Transposition Table
 * Move Ordering
 * Hash Move
 * Internal Iterative Deepening
 * Captures
 * SEE
 * MVV/LVA
 * Killer Heuristic
 * Relative History Heuristic
 * Selectivity
 * Null Move Pruning
 * Futility Pruning
 * Late Move Pruning
 * Late Move Reductions
 * Razoring
 * Check Extensions if SEE >= 0

Evaluation

 * Tapered Eval
 * Texel's Tuning Method
 * Material
 * Piece-Square Tables
 * Pawn Structure
 * King Safety

=Forum Posts=

2018 ...

 * New uci engine: Rofchade by Ronald Friederich, CCC, August 27, 2018
 * rofChade 2.0 released, first version with regular eval by Ronald Friederich, CCC, December 20, 2018
 * New release: rofChade 2.1 by Ronald Friederich, CCC, April 26, 2019
 * New release: rofChade 2.2 by Ronald Friederich, CCC, September 06, 2019

2020 ...

 * New release: rofChade 2.3 by Ronald Friederich, CCC, April 21, 2020
 * Re: A Crossroad in Computer Chess; Or Desperate Flailing for Relevance by Ronald Friederich, CCC, September 29, 2020 » NNUE

=External Links=
 * RofChade – a UCI Chess Engine
 * RofChade in CCRL 40/40

=References= Up one Level