Tim Mann

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Timothy (Tim) Mann, an American computer scientist and programmer from Palo Alto, California. Tim Mann is the creator of XBoard and its Windows pendant WinBoard and its Chess Engine Communication Protocol. In 2002, along with Robert Hyatt, Tim Mann published the ICGA Journal paper on a lock-less transposition table implementation for parallel search.

=XBoard= Tim Mann's quote from an Interview by Frank Quisinsky, April 2000 : Originally, xboard and WinBoard were simply graphical user interfaces for GNU Chess, then for GNU Chess and Internet chess servers. Because the GUI and the chess engine are separate programs, several people thought of the idea of connecting their own chess programs in place of GNU Chess, and they began to email me asking how to do it. I think the first person to ask was Shay Bushinsky, in November 1994. Over the years I received so many requests for this information that I was more or less forced into documenting and extending the ad-hoc engine protocol to support them. The document that exists now (chess-engines.html) evolved directly from the original email reply I sent to Shay. Unfortunately, because the protocol was never really designed, but just grew out of documenting the existing communication with GNU Chess, there are still several bugs and deficiencies in it today. It would be nice to make some major revisions, but then of course it would (at best) take a long time for the existing engines to convert over to the new protocol, so both would have to be supported, probably forever. =Eval tuning in Deep Thought= Eval Tuning in Deep Thought, quote from Tim Mann's Chess Pages : Andreas Nowatzyk was one of the contributors to the Deep Thought project while he was in grad school. A few years ago when he and I were both working for Compaq's research labs in Palo Alto, Andreas sent me a copy of Deep Thought's evaluation function tuning program and asked me to put it on the Web for him, since he no longer has an interest in computer chess.

=Selected Publications=
 * Robert Hyatt, Tim Mann (2002). A lock-less transposition table implementation for parallel search chess engines. ICGA Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1

=Forum Posts=
 * Re: Accessing remote computers with WinBoard by Tim Mann, gnu.chess, November 7, 1993
 * XBoard and WinBoard 3.4, patchlevel 1 by Tim Mann, rec.games.board, December 13 1995
 * XBoard version 3.5 by Tim Mann, rgc, January 03, 1997
 * Re: Using Timeseal with Xboard by Tim Mann, rgc, February 12, 1997
 * XBoard and WinBoard, version 3.6.0 by Tim Mann, rgc, May 09, 1997
 * xboard/WinBoard 4.0.0 available by Tim Mann, rgc, June 21, 1998
 * Re: "Using de Bruijn Sequences to Index a 1 in a Computer Word" by Tim Mann, CCC, February 13, 2002 » Keith H. Randall, De Bruijn Sequence

=External Links=
 * Tim Mann's Home Page
 * Tim Mann's Chess Pages
 * XBoard - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
 * Chess Engine Communication Protocol by Tim Mann & H.G. Muller
 * Tim Mann's TRS-80 Pages » TRS-80

=References=

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