Betsy

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Betsy, a WinBoard compatible chess engine by Landon Rabern, written in C with a little Assembly, released in September 2000. Originally written in Pascal with its own text interface it was rewritten in C using rotated bitboards. Betsy applies PVS with null move pruning, and various standard and some aggressive non-standard extensions and reductions. According to a former Arena site, Betsy was the first published chess engine able to play Chess960, and was therefore Arena partner engine.

=Neural Networks= Quote by Landon Rabern As a child, I was obsessed with machine intelligence. I coded a strong chess AI (codenamed Betsy) and experimented with using neural networks in Betsy, both for the static evaluation at leaf nodes and within the tree for pruning. The networks learned from self-play to get about as good as my hand-tuned functions (discounting the slowdown incurred by sigmoid evaluation). I concluded that to do better, I would need to use raw game state data instead of the set of features I preselected as network inputs; unfortunately, this was 2000 and I did not have nearly enough processing power to do so.

=C# Port= As of 2014, Landon Rabern started to port Betsy to C#, available as open source engine under the MIT License at GitHub. All the major components of a chess engine are there, just not a tuned evaluation. The board class embeds an 8x8 board and the Bitboard board-definition, and implements rotated bitboards. The search is implemented using a derivation chain of classes, the abstract base Brain, TranspositionTableBrain (Transposition Table, Iterative Deepening), and the concrete BasicAlphaBetaBrain (Alpha-Beta), NullMoveBrain (Null Move Pruning) and MTDfBrain (MTD(f)) classes.

=Forum Posts=
 * Re: C or C++ for Chess Programming? by Landon Rabern, CCC, August 18, 2000
 * Betsy 5.0 is now winboard compatable by Landon Rabern, CCC, September 06, 2000
 * Betsy 5.26 by Landon Rabern, CCC, July 06, 2001
 * Re: FRC_TheBaron_101 Vs Fritz8 (Castling vs Not Castling rules) by Landon Rabern, CCC, June 24, 2003
 * Betsy in Arena by Mark Loftus, CCC, September 13, 2003
 * Betsy 6.5.1 by Landon Rabern by Norbert Raimund Leisner, CCC, August 21, 2008

=External Links=

Chess Engine

 * Index of /chess/engines/Norbert's Collection/Betsy by Norbert Raimund Leisner, hosted by Kirill Kryukov
 * Betsy from WBEC Ridderkerk (Internet Archive)
 * Betsy 6.51 Nobook in CCRL 40/2
 * landon rabern - about
 * Betsy Fischer in CCRL 40/4 FRC
 * GitHub - landon/Chess: Beginnings of a port of Betsy to C#

Misc

 * Betsy from Wikipedia
 * Betsy (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * Betsy (dog) from Wikipedia
 * Hurricane Betsy from Wikipedia
 * Tropical Storm Betsy (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * Bitch - You Want It You Got It (Betsy Album) (1988), YouTube Video

=References= Up one Level