Allard Siemelink

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Allard Siemelink, a Dutch computer scientist, IT consultant, and as computer chess programmer author of the chess engines Bright and Spark, which both support the UCI protocol. While Bright utilize a 0x88 board representation, the later Spark started as perft framework using bitboard techniques and experimental program to explore new ideas in search and evaluation.

=Photos= ICT 2010 price giving: Hans Secelle, Allard Siemelink, Hans van der Zijden, Johan de Koning, and Don Dailey

=Quotes= Quote by Allard Siemelink from the Frank Quisinsky interview published in the German online chess magazine Schachwelt : In 1999, when I was working as an ICT consultant for CMG (now Logica), some colleagues started a company competition for who could write the best chess engine. It took me two weeks to create something in Java, and although it was slow and only searched 5 plies deep, it did manage to beat the competition, which incidentally consisted of the two tournament organisers themselves only. Later, when I first learned about bitboards, I just had to give that idea a try and I wrote a new Java engine based on that technique. And although it eventually did fairly well (it was probably 2500-2600 elo'ish), it turned out that Java just wasn't fast enough to be competitive. Have become fully infected by the computer chess virus by that time, I switched to C++ and eventually I created Bright.

=Forum Posts=
 * A perft faster than qperft?! by Allard Siemelink, CCC, April 24, 2008
 * Re: Cache pollution when reading/writing hash table by Allard Siemelink, CCC, August 09, 2009
 * Bright 0.5c released by Allard Siemelink, CCC, January 11, 2010
 * Spark 0.4 released by Allard Siemelink, CCC, May 23, 2010
 * Spark 1.0 released by Allard Siemelink, CCC, December 10, 2010

=External Links=
 * Interview with Allard Siemelink by Frank Quisinsky, Schachwelt, January 10, 2010
 * brightchess - Brightchess (Wayback Machine)
 * Spark Chess by Allard Siemelink (Wayback Machine)

=References= Up one level