Chest

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Chest, (CHEST, CHEss problem analyST) a program for solving orthodox chess problems, such as checkmate, stalemate, helpmate, helpstalemate, selfmate and selfstalemate in N. Chest was developed since 1987, written in C|ANSI C by Heiner Marxen, Holger Pause and Thomas Rakovsky, while Heiner Marxen already started with a mate-in-two solver written in Fortran II in 1973 . Chest does not play chess, but proves shortest solutions or its absence. It was first released in December 1999 as open source .

=Description=

Search
The main tree search function, utilizing a transposition table, is recursive, i.e. for a job of depth N this function does call itself several times with depth N-1, and always performs "iterative deepening", i.e. a job or subjob with a depth of 3 is first computed with a depth of 1, and if that fails, with a depth of 2 and if this also fails, with a depth of 3.

Board Representation
Chest uses a one-dimensional, incremental updated 16x24 mailbox board representation to not only apply vector attacks but also to allow any legal displacement vector between two non-border squares to be added to any legal square without probing memory outside the 16x24 array. Per square, Chest keeps distinct piece type and piece color, and further piece-sets of direct and indirect attacking/defending pieces. The redundancy pays off, since the attack info greatly speeds up the generation of legal moves.

=ChestUCI= ChestUCI by Franz Huber , is an UCI adapter written in Delphi for a slightly modified Chest 3.19 (closed source), to run it from any UCI capable GUI.

=See also=
 * Checkmate
 * Chess Problems, Compositions and Studies
 * CHREST
 * Corresponding Squares
 * Mate-in-two
 * Mate Search
 * Mater
 * Proof-Number Search
 * Stalemate

=Forum Posts=

1999

 * CHEST 3.19 is available by Heiner Marxen, CCC, December 18, 1999
 * Chest 3.19 is incredible! by Dann Corbit, CCC, December 20, 1999
 * 1924 NY Chess Championship -- chest analyzed mates so far by Dann Corbit, CCC, December 27, 1999

2000 ...

 * Problem with CHEST by Jouni Uski, CCC, January 04, 2000
 * Who can help me with Chest (mate solver) by Michel Langeveld, CCC, August 23, 2000
 * Re: Chest (German) by Heiner Marxen, CCC, June 03, 2001
 * The program chest? by Kees van Iersel, CCC, October 10, 2001
 * Nalimov's EGTBs (long post with code) by Heiner Marxen, CCC, October 13, 2001 » Nalimov Tablebases
 * CHEST bugfix available by Heiner Marxen, CCC, May 05, 2002
 * A new(?) technique to recognize draws by Heiner Marxen, CCC, June 01, 2002 » Corresponding Squares, Repetitions
 * ´ChestUCI Ver.1.0´ - a new UCI-engine for the problem solver ´Chest´ by Franz Huber, CCC, August 24, 2002
 * About CHEST by Jouni Uski, CCC, September 18, 2002
 * CHEST vs. ALYBADIX by Jouni Uski, CCC, October 23, 2002 » Alybadix
 * Small Bug in Chest UCI by Michael Drexel, CCC, May 23, 2004

2005 ...

 * ChestUCI 4.4 Update by Franz Huber, CCC, February 14, 2006
 * Stunning Chest! by Jouni Uski, CCC, September 02, 2007
 * ChestUCI 4.6 by Franz Huber, CCC, December 22, 2007
 * ChestUCI v5.0 released by Marek Soszynski, CCC, March 05, 2008

2010 ...

 * ChestUCI Source Code by Louis Zulli, CCC, December 15, 2010
 * ChestUCI 5.2 update by Franz Huber, CCC, March 08, 2011
 * Re: Perft(3) from 1978, with a twist! by Heiner Marxen, CCC, December 09, 2011 » Perft
 * Wanted: A successor to Chest by Marek Soszynski, CCC, June 25, 2012
 * CHEST anniversary! by Franz Huber, CCC, December 18, 2014

2015 ...

 * Add Chest to the elite software chess engines (good or bad?) by Jonathan Lee, CCC, January 07, 2015
 * Faster Forced Mate by MikeGL, CCC, June 26, 2017
 * A mate suite to test multi-pv and new engines by Uri Blass, CCC, August 06, 2018
 * Chest for Linux by Canoike, CCC, September 12, 2019

2020 ...

 * To Franz Huber, Bug in ChestUCI5.2 ? by Paloma, CCC, July 09, 2020 » Bláthy

=External Links=

Chess Program

 * Chest: A Program for Solving Orthodox Chess Problems by Heiner Marxen
 * Readme Long


 * Program Projects by Franz Huber

Misc

 * chest - Wiktionary
 * Chest (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * Chest (furniture) from Wikipedia
 * Chest of drawers from Wikipedia

=References= Up one level