MBChess

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MBChess, a chess program by Marc Boulé, written in C. It was primarily used as test-bed for hardware based FPGA move generation, which was subject of Boulé's Masters thesis in 2002. The FPGA approach performs a Belle like move generation method with find victim and find aggressor cycles in MVV-LVA manner. The move generator includes a PCI interface to connect it to the PC running MBChess. Communication is done via different commands, such as to instruct the move generator to undo the currently stored move, generate and return the next move and execute that move on its internal FPGA board representation. In total, 10,804 out of 18,816 logic cells of a Xilinx XCV800 were used, 10,104 as LUT, 700 as RAM.

=Block Diagram= A block diagram of a chess square with transmitter (TX) and the receiver (RX)

=Hardware vs. Software= MBChess is a very basic chess program, without opening book, only rudimentary evaluation, i.e. almost no king safety, and without null move pruning. The reported ratings obtained on FICS are 1844 and 1692 for MBChess+FPGA and MBChess respectively. Marc Boulé further concluded a bit disappointing results. Even though the pure move generation speed is almost 5 times faster, when using full heuristics, this drops to about 2 times faster. He found that his FPGA move generator, can at best, make/unmake 10M moves a second, which due to PCI bus saturation, will not even transfer from FPGA to PC. Crafty could already make/unmake 30M moves a second on that machine, which implies the only way to speedup Crafty would be to make an FPGA with search and evaluation.

=Publications=
 * Marc Boulé (2002). An FPGA Move Generator for the Game of Chess. Masters thesis, McGill University, (Supervisor: Zeljko Zilic, Co-Supervisor: Monty Newborn)
 * Marc Boulé, Zeljko Zilic (2002). An FPGA Move Generator for the Game of Chess. McGill University
 * Marc Boulé, Zeljko Zilic (2002). An FPGA Move Generator for the Game of Chess. ICGA Journal, Vol. 25, No. 2

=Forum Posts=
 * A Response From Marc Boule by Slater Wold, CCC, April 02, 2002
 * Re: Thesis by Marc Boule by Marc Boulé, CCC, September 07, 2002
 * Re: Thesis by Marc Boule by Marc Boulé, CCC, September 08, 2002

=External Links=
 * FICS Games Database - Statistics for mbchess

=References= Up one Level