Fire

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Fire, (Firebird, Fire xTreme) an UCI compliant chess engine by Norman Schmidt, until version 3.0 derived from IvanHoe and the Ippolit series of programs with some help of Milos Stanisavljevic. Initially called Firebird, and later renamed to Fire due to a trademark naming conflict, it was released as open source, Fire licensed under the GNU GPL. The sources were later closed with Windows executables available for download for recent Intel processors. Fire features magic bitboards, it can be configured with more than 70 UCI options, and applies a SMP parallel search. Since April 2021 with Fire 8.1, the program is open source again.

=Fire 4= Fire 4, released in December 2014, was a compete re-write and does not use any source code from or related to Ippolit. It supports Syzygy Bases, and includes a revamped memory management which uses OpenMP #pragmas to utilize thread local storage and minimize the amount of 'shared' resources among threads for its SMP implementation. Testing was done via massive parallel, automated 24/7 ultra-fast chess engine matches using Cutechess-cli and LittleBlitzer. Code changes were tested to a very high level of confidence using LOS and SPRT (min. 40,000 games) against a pool of top engines. Development and testing included approx. 200,000 - 240,000 ultra-fast games per day. According to a CCC posting by anonymous poster cucumber in September 2020, but in contradiction to Norman Schmidt's later statement, Fire 4 was later released as open source engine Seagull based on Gull, hiding its Fire 4 origin.

=Fire 5, Fire 6.1= Fire 5, released in November 2016, improved with new evaluation terms, and SPSA tuned evaluation and search parameters, and supports Chess960. Fire 6.1, released in September 2017, added approximately 30-40 Elo in playing strength.

=Fire 7.1= Fire 7.1 from May 27, 2018, was announced as the last public release of Fire. Its private successor, Fire 8_beta won the League 1 of TCEC Season 19 in summer 2020, and qualified for the top eight in the Premier Division. On September 18, 2020, Ethereal author Andrew Grant published a Fire 7.1 GPLv3 Source Request in CCC, since he believes that some or all of Fire is likely to fall under the GPLv3, as it is inherited from Stockfish's GPLv3 license.

=Fire 8= Fire 8 with smaller and highly tuned evaluation was released on Februray 23, 2021. The further optimized Fire 8.1 was released on April 16, 2021 as open source, licensed under the GNU GPL. Fire_8.N, released on May 22, 2021, features NNUE by utilizing a modified version of Daniel Shawul's ScorpioNNUE probing code along with a reinforcement learning net created by Sergio Vieri.

=See also=
 * FireFly
 * Firenzina
 * IvanHoe
 * Phoenix

=Forum Posts=

2010 ...

 * Firebird 1.0.... by Dr.Wael Deeb, CCC, January 12, 2010
 * GGT + Firebird wins Amar Gambit + related chess notes + by Rainer Neuhäusler, CCC, January 30, 2010
 * Firebird wins Ware Gambit by Rainer Neuhäusler, CCC, February 02, 2010
 * I should mention that I also made a few small fixes to fire by Dann Corbit, CCC, March 09, 2011
 * Houdini, Fire, IvanHoe, (and Rybka?) are 'clones'...? by Norman Schmidt, CCC, April 30, 2011
 * Fire 3.0 released by Stefan Pohl, CCC, December 13, 2013

2015 ...

 * Fire 4 for linux by Lucas Braesch, CCC, July 03, 2015
 * Fire 5 by Rainer Neuhäusler, CCC, May 31, 2016
 * Fire 5 is out! by Dmitri Gusev, CCC, November 14, 2016
 * Fire 6 is available! by Anton Ross, CCC, September 22, 2017
 * Re: Fire 6 is available! by Norman Schmidt, CCC, September 23, 2017


 * Fire 7 by Norman Schmidt, CCC, May 21, 2018
 * Fire 7.1 by Norman Schmidt, CCC, May 27, 2018

2020 ...

 * Fire question! by Frank Quisinsky, CCC, September 08, 2020
 * Fire 7.1 GPLv3 Source Request by Andrew Grant, CCC, September 18, 2020 » Stockfish
 * Re: Fire 7.1 GPLv3 Source Request by cucumber, CCC, September 23, 2020 » Seagull


 * Fire 8 released by matejst, ProDeo Forum, February 25, 2021
 * Fire 8 GPLv3 Source Request by Andrew Grant, CCC, February 26, 2021 (Engine Origins)
 * Re: Fire 8 GPLv3 Source Request by Norman Schmidt, CCC, February 26, 2021


 * Re: New engine releases & news 2021 by Norman Schmidt, CCC, April 19, 2021
 * Re: New engine releases & news 2021 by Norman Schmidt, CCC, May 22, 2021
 * Re: will Tcec allow Stockfish with a Leela net to play? by Connor McMonigle, CCC, June 17, 2021 » NNUE
 * Re: will Tcec allow Stockfish with a Leela net to play? by Norman Schmidt, CCC, June 17, 2021

=External Links=

Chess Engine

 * Fire Chess Engine
 * ABOUT | fire
 * GitHub - FireFather/fire: a very strong, state-of-the-art, highly optimized, open-source freeware UCI chess engine...
 * Fire – the chess engine releases a new version, Chessdom, October 02, 2017 » TCEC Season 10
 * Fire in CCRL 40/40

Misc

 * Fire from Wikipedia
 * Portal:Fire from Wikipedia
 * Fire (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * Fire (classical element) from Wikipedia
 * Fire ecology from Wikipedia
 * Firefighting from Wikipedia
 * Fire protection from Wikipedia
 * List of fires from Wikipedia
 * Arson from Wikipedia
 * Conflagration from Wikipedia
 * Pyromania from Wikipedia
 * Quest for Fire (film) from Wikipedia
 * Firebird from Wikipedia
 * Firebird (database server) from Wikipedia
 * The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education - FIRE
 * The Rolling Stones - Play with Fire (1965), YouTube Video

=References= Up one Level