Bonanza

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Bonanza, (Bonanza Feliz) an XBoard compliant open source Shogi engine developed by primary author Kunihito Hoki, started in 2004, at times supported by Takuya Obata, Takuya Sugiyama, and Takeshi Ito . Bonanza is top contender at Computer Olympiads and World Computer Shogi Championships and so far two times champion, winning the WCSC16 in 2006, and the WCSC23 in 2013.

=Description= Bonanza is written in C and utilizes 9x9 Bitboards in form of three 32-bit unsigned integers. It is a fractional ply alpha-beta engine performing a principal variation search with transposition table, null move pruning, recursive iterative-deepening for PV-nodes, various extensions, reductions, and futility pruning. Bonanza pioneered in large-scale machine learning of static evaluation functions, a supervised tuning method based on move adaptation, dubbed the Bonanza Method which evolved to Minimax Tree Optimization (MMTO). Bonanza utilizes and tuned piece-square tables indexed by king location and further two-piece locations and side to move (turn), dubbed KPP, KKP or KPPT, which was used in many other Shogi programs, and has influenced the design of NNUE.

Beside a parallel tree search, Bonanza is able to apply parallelization by the so called Consensus method , a kind of triple-brain approach where multiple, slightly modified instances of the same engine vote for the best move .

=Publications=
 * Kunihito Hoki (2006). Optimal control of minimax search result to learn positional evaluation. 11th Game Programming Workshop (Japanese)
 * Takuya Obata, Takuya Sugiyama, Kunihito Hoki, Takeshi Ito (2010). Consultation Algorithm for Computer Shogi: Move Decisions by Majority. CG 2010
 * Takuya Sugiyama, Takuya Obata, Kunihito Hoki, Takeshi Ito (2010). Optimistic Selection Rule Better Than Majority Voting System. CG 2010
 * Tomoyuki Kaneko, Kunihito Hoki (2011). Analysis of Evaluation-Function Learning by Comparison of Sibling Nodes. Advances in Computer Games 13
 * Kunihito Hoki, Tomoyuki Kaneko (2011). The Global Landscape of Objective Functions for the Optimization of Shogi Piece Values with a Game-Tree Search. Advances in Computer Games 13
 * Kunihito Hoki, Masakazu Muramatsu (2012). Efficiency of three Forward-Pruning Techniques in Shogi: Futility Pruning, Null-move Pruning, and Late Move Reduction (LMR). Entertainment Computing, Vol. 3, No. 3
 * Kunihito Hoki, Tomoyuki Kaneko (2014). Large-Scale Optimization for Evaluation Functions with Minimax Search. JAIR Vol. 49, pdf
 * Kunihito Hoki, Seiya Omori, Takeshi Ito (2014). Analysis of Performance of Consultation Methods in Computer Chess. Journal of Information Science and Engineering, Vol. 30, pdf
 * Takenobu Takizawa, Takeshi Ito, Takuya Hiraoka, Kunihito Hoki (2015). Contemporary Computer Shogi. Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games

=Forum Posts=
 * Source file of Bonanza 4.0.3 became available to downloadable by Takodori, SHOGI-L, January 29, 2009
 * XBoard version of Bonanza by Harm Geert Muller, CCC, October 20, 2010
 * The Japan Times on-line 20111102 and Shogi by Alain Van hentenryck, SHOGI-L, November 02, 2011
 * Bonanza wins Computer Shogi Championship by Hiroshi Yamashita, SHOGI-L, May 06, 2013
 * Bonanza version adapted for interactive analysis (release) by Harm Geert Muller, CCC, September 14, 2013
 * Bonanza version adapted for interactive analysis by Harm Geert Muller, SHOGI-L, September 14, 2013
 * better appearance of BONANZA by shogipl..., SHOGI-L, October 21, 2014

=External Links=

Shogi Engine

 * GitHub - ianfab/bonanza: strong shogi engine (with support for XBoard protocol) hosted by Fabian Fichter
 * Bonanza Shogi Engine hosted by Harm Geert Muller
 * Bonanza's ICGA Tournaments
 * Famous Shogi Games: Bonanza vs Watanabe (March 21, 2007), YouTube Video

Misc

 * bonanza - Wiktionary
 * Bonanza (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * Bonanza from Wikipedia
 * Feliz from Wikipedia

=References= Up one Level