Belofte

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Belofte, (Belofte Chess) an open source chess engine by Yves De Billoëz, written in C and released under the GPL license v2. Belofte is a console application, and supports the Chess Engine Communication Protocol aka WinBoard/XBoard protocol, since Belofte 2.0.6 in October 2020, UCI.

=Features= The engine supports EPD test sets and can be run with initialization files. Games are saved in PGN format. PGN files can be converted into an opening book. Internally, Belofte keeps a two-dimensional 8x8 board performing pure negamax alpha-beta inside an iterative deepening framework.

=History= Development started in 2005 and version 0.2.x made appearance on freechess.org chess server and in source code. At that time, it was released with a custom license (but still free for the open source community). Versions 0.3 till 0.6 were converted to C++ and developed under windows but compilation on other platforms failed. Source code for those versions is available. In 2017, the old version was re-released under GPL license and a new version 0.9.x is making its appearance. It is a branch from the 0.2 release and gradually, all changes from the 0.3+ branches will be included. Belofte 2.0.6, released in October 2020, was a rewrite from scratch in C++.

=Forum Posts=

2007

 * Pawns more valuable than queens !! by Matthias Gemuh, Winboard Forum, July 10, 2007

2017 ...

 * New engine: belofte by Yves De Billoëz, CCC, June 29, 2017
 * Belofte 0.9.1 for Linux and Macintosh by Norbert Raimund Leisner, CCC, July 06, 2017
 * Belofte news by Yves De Billoëz, CCC, August 07, 2018
 * Engine update - belofte 0.9.6 released by Yves De Billoëz, CCC, December 15, 2019

2020 ...

 * Re: New engine releases 2020 by Yves De Billoëz, CCC, October 27, 2020
 * Re: New engine releases 2021 by Yves De Billoëz, CCC, January 26, 2021

=External links=

Chess Engine

 * Belofte Source code on souceforge
 * MacChess - Dedicated to chess on Mac
 * Belofte in CCRL Blitz

Misc

 * Belofte - Wikipedia.nl (Dutch)

=References= Up one level