Xiphos

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Xiphos, an UCI compliant open source chess engine by Milos Tatarevic, written in C, licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, first released on February 28, 2018. Xiphos utilizes bitboards with BERLEF mapping (a1=56, a8=63, h1=0, h8=7). Sliding piece attacks are determined by either magic bitboards, or if compiled for BMI2 capable x86-64 processors, by PEXT bitboards. Xiphos executables are available to run under Linux, Mac OS and Windows. Still work in progress with a relatively simple evaluation function, the first Xiphos release should already be on par with engines rated around 3000 Elo on CCRL 40/4 scale.

=Acknowledgements= Milos Tatarevic was inspired by Garry Kasparov's book Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins, which evoked his childhood passion computer chess, wondering how hard it could be to develop an engine strong enough to suppress the legendary Deep Blue - giving it a try. The Home (Thank You) and following open source engines were mentioned as further inspiration in the author's acknowledgements :
 * Crafty
 * Demolito
 * Hakkapeliitta
 * Micro-Max
 * Senpai
 * Stockfish
 * Sunfish

=Selected Features=

Search

 * Parallel Search using Threads
 * Iterative Deepening
 * Aspiration Windows
 * Principal Variation Search
 * Transposition Table
 * Shared Hash Table


 * Move Ordering
 * Countermove Heuristic
 * History Heuristic
 * Internal Iterative Deepening
 * Killer Heuristic
 * MVV/LVA
 * SEE


 * Singular Extensions (0.2)
 * Pruning
 * Futility Pruning
 * Late Move Pruning
 * Null Move Pruning
 * ProbCut


 * Reductions
 * Late Move Reductions
 * Razoring


 * Quiescence Search

Evaluation

 * Tapered Eval
 * Material
 * Bishop Pair


 * Pawn Structure
 * Pawn Hash Table
 * Doubled Pawn
 * Isolated Pawn
 * Passed Pawn


 * Mobility
 * Rooks on (Semi) Open Files
 * King Safety

Misc

 * Perft
 * Magic Bitboards
 * PEXT Bitboards

=Forum Posts=
 * New engine: Xiphos by Milos Tatarevic, CCC, February 28, 2018
 * Xiphos 0.2 by Milos Tatarevic, CCC, April 14, 2018
 * Xiphos 0.2.2 by Milos Tatarevic, CCC, April 20, 2018
 * Xiphos 0.3 by Milos Tatarevic, CCC, June 25, 2018

=External Links=

Chess Engine

 * GitHub - milostatarevic/xiphos: UCI chess engine

Misc

 * Xiphos from Wikipedia
 * The SWORD Project from Wikipedia

=References= Up one Level