Pharaon

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Pharaon, a WinBoard and UCI compliant chess engine by Franck Zibi, written in C++. Pharaon evolved from Franck's former program ZChess, which was renamed in April 2001.

=Description= Pharaon incorporates object oriented paradigms, and relies on bitboards, in particular rotated bitboards to determine sliding piece attacks. It is a PV searcher with iterative deepening and aspiration windows, using a transposition table with multiple probes, pawn- and king safety hash tables, SEE for move ordering and pruning, adaptive null move pruning with R = 2,3, and heavily prunes not only in quiescence search. Move ordering considers hash-table move, winning captures by SEE, killer heuristic, counter move heuristic, and history heuristic. Chess960 support was introduced with version 3.3, and subsequent "deep" versions with a parallel search have tablebase support, a persistent hash table for position learning as well as book learning.

=Tournament Play= Pharaon participated at the WMCCC 2001 in Maastricht, and already had its debut at the CCT3 online tournament, and short after over the board at Massy 2001. It further played two Livingston Chess960 Computer World Championships, the Chess960CWC 2005 and the Chess960CWC 2006, and further French Computer Chess Championships, French Programmers Tournaments and CCT Tournaments.

=Selected Games= FCCC 2002, round 4, Pharaon - Chess Tiger 15.0 [Event "FCCC 2002"] [Site "Massy"] [Date "2002.10.05"] [Round "4"] [White "Pharaon"] [Black "Chess Tiger 15.0"] [Result "1-0"]

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 d5 4.cxd5 Nxd5 5.e4 Nxc3 6.bxc3 Bg7 7.Bc4 c5 8.Ne2 Nc6 9.Be3 O-O 10.Rc1 cxd4 11.cxd4 Qa5+ 12.Kf1 Qa3 13.Qb3 Qd6 14.Bd5 Na5 15.Qa4 Qd8 16.Bd2 Nc6 17.Bxc6 bxc6 18.Ba5 Qe8 19.Qxc6 Qxc6 20.Rxc6 Bb7 21.Rc7 Bxe4 22.f3 Bd5 23.Kf2 e6 24.a3 Rfc8 25.Rhc1 Rxc7 26.Rxc7 Bf6 27.Bb4 Bd8 28.Rc3 g5 29.Rc2 f5 30.Nc3 Bb3 31.Rb2 Bc4 32.Bd6 Ba5 33.Na4 Bd5 34.Rb5 Bd8 35.Nc5 Kf7 36.Ke3 Bc6 37.Rb2 f4+ 38.Kd3 Bb6 39.Be5 Rd8 40.Ne4 Bxe4+ 41.Kxe4 Rc8 42.g3 fxg3 43.hxg3 Rc1 44.g4 Re1+ 45.Kd3 Ra1 46.Rb3 h6 47.Ke4 Kg6 48.Rc3 Re1+ 49.Kd3 Rd1+ 50.Ke2 Ra1 51.Rc8 Ra2+ 52.Kd3 Rxa3+ 53.Ke4 Rb3 54.Rf8 a5 55.Rf6+ Kh7 56.Rxe6 a4 57.Re8 Kg6 58.Re7 h5 59.f4 Kh6 60.Kf5 Rf3 61.Bg7+ Kh7 62.Bf6+ Kg8 63.Kg6 Kf8 64.Re5 Re3 1-0

=See also=
 * Anubis
 * CHEOPS
 * ZChess

=Forum Posts=

2001 ...

 * Re: Delfe 1.0, UCI / WB Pharaon / Chess Adivisor, Comet B.37 available ... by Franck Zibi, CCC, August 02, 2001
 * Re: Where to download Pharaon? (NT) by Franck Zibi, CCC, August 03, 2001
 * Pharaon 2.50 for WinBoard is available by Franck Zibi, CCC, September 01, 2001
 * Pharaon 2.61 is available (with WinBoard and UCI support) by Franck Zibi, CCC, January 19, 2002
 * interesting move by Pharaon by Jon Dart, CCC, June 06, 2002
 * French ch Pharaon-Tiger15 - nice attack by Sune Larsson, CCC, October 06, 2002 » FCCC 2002
 * Opening Bug in Nejmet and Pharaon by Mainflame, Winboard Forum, May 31, 2003 » Nejmet, Opening Book
 * Announcement : Release of Pharaon v3 by Franck Zibi, CCC, October 21, 2004
 * Re: Mail from Franck Zibi by Franck Zibi, CCC, December 30, 2004

2005 ...

 * Release of Pharaon v3.2 by Franck Zibi, CCC, January 08, 2005
 * Release of Pharaon v3.3 (with Chess 960 support) by Franck Zibi, CCC, June 17, 2005
 * Pharaon - winboard.debug: what goes wrong here? by Robert Allgeuer, Winboard Forum, October 28, 2006
 * Pharaon in Mainz 2006 by Franck Zibi, Winboard Forum, August 30, 2006 » Chess960CWC 2006

=External Links=

Chess Engine

 * Home of Pharaon
 * About Deep Pharaon 3.5.1


 * Pharaon History
 * Pharaon's ICGA Tournaments (includes ZChess)
 * “20 Questions” with Franck Zibi (Author of Pharaon), Questions by Michael Diosi, Frank Quisinsky and Christopher Conkie, April 2005
 * The chess games of PHARAON from chessgames.com
 * Pharaon in CCRL 40/40

Pharaoh

 * Pharaon from Wikipedia.fr (French)
 * Pharaoh from Wikipedia
 * List of pharaohs from Wikipedia
 * Pharaoh (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * Miles Davis - Pharaoh's Dance (composed by Joe Zawinul), Bitches Brew (1970), YouTube Video
 * lineup: Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Bennie Maupin, Joe Zawinul, Larry Young, Chick Corea
 * John McLaughlin, Dave Holland, Harvey Brooks, Lenny White, Jack DeJohnette, Don Alias, Juma Santos

=References= Up one level