BBChess (SI)

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BBChess, a free open source engine licensed under the GNU General Public License, written in C|ANSI C by Borko Bošković starting in 2005. BBChess is Chess Engine Communication Protocol compatible and can be compiled for Linux and Windows. It performs a parallel search using threads, PVS, and determines sliding piece attacks with magic bitboards. =Differential Evolution= BBChess' was further object of research in genetic programming at Computer Architecture and Languages Laboratory, Institute of Computer Science at University of Maribor, its evaluation was tuned by differential evolution (DE), which was also topic of Bošković's Ph.D. thesis : The DE algorithm employs mutation and cross-over operations to generate new individuals and selection operation to select individuals that will survive into next generation. Before selection operation is employed, individuals have to be evaluated. In our case individuals are evaluated according to the games they have played. Therefore individuals play a specific number of games in each generation and individuals with greater efficiency survive into the next generation...

With the proposed tuning approach, we tuned the chess evaluation function of BBChess chess program. Tuning was done with and without expert knowledge. When we tuned the parameters without expert knowledge, because the search space was huge, we tuned only a few parameters. After 500 generations of the evolutionary process, the value of parameters convergence to the values that relationship were approximately equal as known from the chess theory. When we tuned the parameter values with expert knowledge, the tuning intervals of parameter values were set around the approximate values and the number of tuned parameters was 190. The obtained results show that, our approach was successful.

=Namesake=
 * BBchess by Bernard Brioit

=See also=
 * MinkoChess

=Publications=
 * Borko Bošković, Sašo Greiner, Janez Brest, Viljem Žumer (2005). The representation of chess game. 27th International Conference on Information Technology Interfaces
 * Borko Bošković, Sašo Greiner, Janez Brest, Viljem Žumer (2006). A Differential Evolution for the Tuning of a Chess Evaluation Function. IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation
 * Borko Bošković, Sašo Greiner, Janez Brest, Viljem Žumer (2007). Uglaševanje šahovskega programa BBChess z uporabo algoritma diferencialne evolucije. Zbornik šestnajste mednarodne Elektrotehniške in računalniške konference ERK (Slovenian)
 * Borko Bošković, Sašo Greiner, Janez Brest, Aleš Zamuda, Viljem Žumer (2008). An Adaptive Differential Evolution Algorithm with Opposition-Based Mechanisms, Applied to the Tuning of a Chess Program. Advances in Differential Evolution, Springer
 * Borko Bošković (2010). Differential Evolution for the Tuning of a Chess Evaluation Function. Ph.D. thesis, University of Maribor
 * Borko Bošković, Janez Brest (2011). Tuning Chess Evaluation Function Parameters using Differential Evolution. Informatica, Vol. 35, No. 2
 * Borko Bošković, Janez Brest, Aleš Zamuda, Sašo Greiner, Viljem Žumer (2011). History mechanism supported differential evolution for chess evaluation function tuning. Soft Computing, Vol. 15, No. 4

=Forum Posts=
 * BBChess 1.2 : 2296 by Patrick Buchmann, CCC, September 21, 2007
 * BBChess 1.2a : 2287 by Patrick Buchmann, CCC, October 10, 2007
 * BBChess 1.3a : 2309 by Patrick Buchmann, CCC, March 02, 2008
 * BBChess 1.3b : 2384 by Patrick Buchmann, CCC, Januray 17, 2009

=External Links=

Chess Engine

 * Chess program BBChess - Computer Architecture and Languages Laboratory, University of Maribor
 * BBChess in CCRL 40/40
 * BBChess 1.3b 64-bit in CCRL 40/4

Misc

 * Black Stone Raiders - live at Festival Lent, Maribor, June 26, 2011, YouTube Video
 * Jean-Paul Bourelly, Darryl Jones, Will Calhoun

=References= Up one Level