Falcon

Home * Engines * Falcon



Falcon, a strong private chess engine by Omid David and successor of Omid's earlier program Genesis. Falcon participated at three World Computer Chess Championships, the WCCC 2003 in Graz, the WCCC 2004 in Ramat Gan, and the WCCC 2008 in Beijing, as well the CCT6 on-line tournament. Book authors were Eros Riccio in 2004, and Erdogan Günes in 2008.

=Features= Falcon applies NegaScout/PVS with null move pruning, internal iterative deepening, dynamic move ordering by history and killer heuristic, multi-cut pruning, selective extensions, transposition table, and futility pruning near leaf nodes, and blockade detection in endgames.

=Genetic Algorithm= Omid David has combined his secret efforts with scientific publications, since Falcon was test-bed and object in research of verified null-move pruning, extended null-move reductions , and Genetic Algorithms in evaluation and search tuning , the latter on optimizing 18 search control parameters packed into a 70-bit chromosome. The fitness function is the total node count up to the solutions found, from the 879 most tactical positions of the Encyclopedia of Chess Middlegames, as already used by Yngvi Björnsson and Tony Marsland in Learning Control of Search Extensions , the lower the fitter. A one-point crossover uses the chromosomes of two parents, selected based on fitness criterion, and creates two offspring. The mutation operator randomly flips some bits with low probability.

Falcon Breeding
Falcon's GA procedure as pseudo code : 1. initialization: randomly generate n 70-bit chromosomes 2.  evaluate fitness of each chromosome of a population 3.  if (N generations is reached OR fitness value > threshold ) terminate repeat until n offspring are generated a.  select pair of parents from current population based on fitness criterion b.  with probability p, apply crossover to generate two offspring c.  mutate the two offspring by randomly flipping some bits 4.  replace the old population with the newly generated population 5.  goto 2

Learning Result
With a population size of 10, a crossover rate of 0.75, mutation rate of 0.05, and 50 generations, following search parameters were learned after 35 hours, as noted, not necessarily the best parameter set for every chess program : =Selected Games= WCCC 2004 round 11, Falcon - Shredder [Event "WCCC 2004"] [Site "Ramat Gan, Israel"] [Date "2004.07.12"] [Round "11"] [White "Falcon"] [Black "Shredder"] [Result "1/2-1/2"]

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Be3 e6 7.f3 b5 8.g4 h6 9.Qd2 Nbd7 10.O-O-O Bb7 11.h4 d5 12.Bh3 b4 13.Na4 dxe4 14.g5 hxg5 15.hxg5 exf3 16.g6 Rxh3 17.Rxh3 Qa5 18.b3 Ne5 19.gxf7+ Kxf7 20.Bg5 Ne4 21.Qf4+ Kg8 22.Nxe6 Ng6 23.Rh8+ Nxh8 24.Rd7 Nf6 25.Bxf6 Ng6 26.Qd4 Qf5 27.Nxf8 Qxf6 28.Qxf6 gxf6 29.Nh7 Ne5 30.Nxf6+ Kf8 31.Nh7+ Kg8 32.Nf6+ Kf8 33.Nh7+ Kg8 34.Nf6+ 1/2-1/2 =See also=
 * Genesis

=Publications=
 * Omid David, Nathan S. Netanyahu (2002). Verified null-move pruning. ICGA Journal, Vol. 25, No. 3
 * Omid David, Ariel Felner, Nathan S. Netanyahu (2004). Blockage Detection in Pawn Endgames. ICGA Journal, Vol. 27, No. 3
 * Omid David, Nathan S. Netanyahu (2008). Extended Null-Move Reductions. CG 2008, pdf
 * Omid David, Moshe Koppel, Nathan S. Netanyahu (2008). Genetic Algorithms for Mentor-Assisted Evaluation Function Optimization. GECCO '08
 * Omid David (2009). Genetic Algorithms Based Learning for Evolving Intelligent Organisms. Ph.D. Thesis
 * Omid David, Jaap van den Herik, Moshe Koppel, Nathan S. Netanyahu (2009). Simulating Human Grandmasters: Evolution and Coevolution of Evaluation Functions.GECCO '09
 * Omid David, Moshe Koppel, Nathan S. Netanyahu (2010). Expert-Driven Genetic Algorithms for Simulating Evaluation Functions.
 * Omid David, Nathan S. Netanyahu, Yoav Rosenberg, Moshe Shimoni (2010). Genetic Algorithms for Automatic Classification of Moving Objects. GECCO '10
 * Omid David, Moshe Koppel, Nathan S. Netanyahu (2010). Genetic Algorithms for Automatic Search Tuning. ICGA Journal, Vol. 33, No. 2
 * Omid David, Jaap van den Herik, Moshe Koppel, Nathan S. Netanyahu (2014). Genetic Algorithms for Evolving Computer Chess Programs. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, pdf

=Forum Posts=
 * Objective proposal Falcon - Crafty by Vincent Diepeveen, CCC, April 29, 2004
 * Diep and Falcon #2 and 3 by Chessfun, CCC, April 30, 2004
 * Re: Are you planning to make an SMP version of Falcon? by Omid David, CCC, July 13, 2004
 * Falcon by Omid David Tabibi by Norbert Raimund Leisner, CCC, January 03, 2012

=External Links=
 * Falcon's ICGA Tournaments
 * The chess games of Falcon from chessgames.com

Falcon Chess Variant

 * Falcon Chess from The Chess Variant Pages
 * Falcon Chess by Harm Geert Muller

Falcons

 * Falcon (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * Falcon from Wikipedia
 * Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy of birds from Wikipedia
 * Falconiformes from Wikipedia
 * Falconidae from Wikipedia
 * List of Falconidae
 * Common Kestrel from Wikipedia
 * Gyrfalcon from Wikipedia
 * Peregrine Falcon from Wikipedia
 * Saker Falcon from Wikipedia


 * BBC Nature - Peregrine falcon videos, news and facts
 * Falcons - EcoWeb - Nottingham Trent University
 * BBC News - Rare peregrine falcons raise four chicks in Nottingham
 * News - CMNH Falcon Cam
 * Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group at UCSC - HOME
 * SCPBRG: Peregrine Falcon Web Cam, San Francisco
 * Nick Dunlop Photography

Falconry

 * Falconry from Wikipedia
 * De arte venandi cum avibus by Frederick II - Wikipedia
 * Falconry Canada
 * Falconry by David Maritz
 * Falconry - Falkenhorst Schloss Aschbach
 * Falconry Information Clearinghouse
 * Nad Al Shiba Falcons
 * Scottish Falcon Breeders

The Maltese Falcon

 * The Maltese Falcon (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * The Maltese Falcon (novel) from Wikipedia
 * The Maltese Falcon (1941 film) from Wikipedia
 * The Maltese Falcon (yacht) from Wikipedia

Misc

 * Falcón (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * Falcón from Wikipedia


 * Falcon (programming language) from Wikipedia
 * Falcon Northwest from Wikipedia
 * Falkenberg (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * Falkenburg (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * Valkenburg (disambiguation) from Wikipedia

=References= Up one Level