Rocinante

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Rocinante, an UCI compliant, experimental open source chess engine by Antonio Torrecillas, written in C++ and licensed under the GNU General Public License. Rocinante was developed as test bed for best-first search algorithms, notably PB* by Hans Berliner and Chris McConnell, and was first released in August 2009. Rocinante 2.0, released in May 2012, was a rewrite changing the board representation from bitboards to mailbox, and further added a greedy Monte-Carlo Tree Search without random playouts, dubbed MCαβ, as additional search algorithm. Both, MCαβ and PB* Rocinante may be configured to apply a shallow alpha-beta search as a replacement for the static evaluation. Rocinante source can be compiled to run under various platforms and operating systems such as Windows, Linux and Android.

=Etymology= Rocinante is Don Quixote's horse in the novel The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. In many ways, Rocinante is not only Don Quixote's horse, but also his double: like Don Quixote, he is awkward, past his prime, and engaged in a task beyond his capacities. Rocín in Spanish means a work horse or low-quality horse, but can also mean an illiterate or rough man. The name is a complex pun. In Spanish, ante has several meanings and can function as a standalone word as well as a suffix. One meaning is "before" or "previously". Another is "in front of". As a suffix, -ante in Spanish is adverbial; rocinante refers to functioning as, or being, a rocín. "Rocinante," then, follows Cervantes' pattern using ambiguous, multivalent words, common throughout the novel.

=See also=
 * B*
 * MCαβ
 * Simplex

=Forum Posts=
 * engine Rocinante is available by Antonio Torrecillas, CCC, August 12, 2009
 * Rocinante, why ? by Antonio Torrecillas, CCC, November 20, 2011
 * Rocinante 2.0 Release by Antonio Torrecillas, CCC, May 30, 2012
 * Whish list for Rocinante by Antonio Torrecillas, CCC, November 21, 2012

=External Links=

Chess Engine

 * Barajando Trebejos (Download Rocinante and Simplex)
 * Index of /chess/engines/Jim Ablett/ROCINANTE by Jim Ablett, hosted by Kirill Kryukov
 * Index of /chess/engines/Jim Ablett/+++ LINUX ENGINES ++/32 BIT/rocinante
 * Index of /chess/engines/Jim Ablett/+++ LINUX ENGINES ++/64 BIT/rocinante


 * Rocinante 2.0 64-bit (mcts) in CCRL 40/4
 * Rocinante 2.0 64-bit (PB*) in CCRL 40/4 in CCRL 40/4

Misc

 * Rocinante from Wikipedia
 * Rocinante (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * If - Don Quixote's Masquerade, 1975, YouTube Video

=References= Up one Level