Cheiron

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Cheiron, a chess program by Ulf Lorenz. Cheiron is the German spelling of Chiron, a centaur creature of the Greek mythology. The program played the 8th World Computer Chess Championship 1995 in Shatin, Hong Kong and the 13th World Microcomputer Chess Championship 1995 in Paderborn, as well the IPCCC 1994 and IPCCC 1997.

=Description= from the ICGA-site : In Greek mythology, Cheiron was the wisest of all centaurs and the teacher of many heroes. The program Cheiron is written in C. It is an alpha-beta program using most of the known state-of-the-art heuristics including killer heuristics, transposition table, aspiration search, plausible move ordering, iterative deepening, selective deepening etc. Null moves, however, are not used. The quiescence search is quite large and examines some tactical motifs, particularly mating and promotion threats.

Apart from the move generator, the evaluation function is the most expensive part of the program. It examines the pawn structure, king's security, static positions of the pieces, everlasting knights etc. as well as special situations in the endgame (e.g. there are positions when two pawns are more worth than a rook).

On a Pentium 90MHz the program will search about 10,000 nodes per second. Cheiron is more a positional playing than a tactical playing program. Cheiron uses an opening book containing about 12,000 positions to get a good start into the game. Using the Bednorz-Toennissen test, Cheiron has an estimated rating of 2100 ELO on a 50MHz PC. Tournament results against humans supports this number. Originally, the program was developed for Unix boxes, but a version has been developed with a graphical interface using C|Turbo C in a DOS-Windows 3.1 environment.

=Selected Games= WCCC 1995, round 1, Gandalf - Cheiron [Event "WCCC 1995"] [Site "Shatin, Hong Kong"] [Date "1995.05.25"] [Round "1"] [White "Gandalf"] [Black "Cheiron"] [Result "0-1"]

1.e4 e6 2.d4 c5 3.Nf3 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Bd3 Be7 6.O-O Nc6 7.Be3 O-O 8.Nc3 d6 9.Nxc6 bxc6 10.f3 d5 11.e5 d4 12.exf6 Bxf6 13.Bxd4 Qxd4+ 14.Kh1 Rb8 15.Rb1 Rd8 16.Qe2 Bb7 17.a3 Be5 18.Rfe1 Bc7 19.Qe4 Qxe4 20.Nxe4 Rd5 21.g3 c5 22.Kg2 Rbd8 23.h3 Bb6 24.b3 Rd4 25.Re3 R4d7 26.Re2 Rd5 27.Bc4 Rd1 28.Rxd1 Rxd1 29.h4 g6 30.Kf2 Kf8 31.Re1 Rxe1 32.Kxe1 Ke7 33.g4 f5 34.Ng5 h6 35.Nxe6 Bxf3 36.gxf5 gxf5 37.c3 Kd6 38.Kd2 Bd5 39.Bxd5 Kxd5 40.Nf4+ Ke4 41.Nd3 f4 42.h5 c4 43.bxc4 Be3+ 44.Kc2 f3 45.a4 f2 46.Nxf2+ Bxf2 47.a5 0-1

=See also=
 * Achilles
 * Centaur
 * Chiron

=External Links=

Chess Program

 * Cheiron's ICGA Tournaments

Misc

 * Cheiron – Wikipedia.de (German)
 * Chiron (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * Chiron from Wikipedia
 * Category:Chiron - Wikimedia Commons

=References= Up one Level