Naraka ^[1]

Naraku,
an UCI compatible chess engine by Marco Meloni, written in C, first released in July 2010. Naraku is a bitboard engine, applying standard search techniques such as alpha-beta with transposition table inside an iterative deepening framework, enhanced by null move pruning, futility pruning, late move reductions and quiescence search ^[2]. Naraku had a strong tournament debut, winning TCEC Season 2, Division F in February 2011. After clone suspicions appeared ^[3], and admitting taking ideas from Fruit, Crafty, Ippolit (bitboard infrastructure) and Stockfish, the author stopped working on Naraku ^[4].

Etymology

The name of the engine is borrowed from the main antagonist of the Inuyasha Japanese manga series, Naraku (奈落, Naraku, litt. Naraka, Hell), a half-demon responsible for the misery of most of the main cast ^[5].

Selected Games

TCEC Season 2, Division F, Philou 3.5 - Naraku 1.31 ^[6]

[Event "TCEC Season 2 - Division F"]
[Site "http://tcec.chessdom.com"]
[Date "2011.02.15"]
[Round "7.3"]
[White "Philou 3.5"]
[Black "Naraku 1.31"]
[Result "0-1"]

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Bb5 Bb4 5.O-O O-O 6.d3 Bxc3 7.bxc3 d5 8.exd5 Qxd5 9.Bc4 Qa5 10.Rb1 a6 
11.Rb3 h6 12.Ra3 Qc5 13.Ra4 Re8 14.Ba3 Qb6 15.Bb3 Bg4 16.h3 Bh5 17.Re1 e4 18.dxe4 Ne5 19.g4 Nfxg4 
20.hxg4 Bxg4 21.Re3 Qf6 22.Kg2 Rad8 23.Rd4 Bh5 24.Rdd3 Nxf3 25.Rxf3 Qg5+ 26.Kf1 Qh4 27.Bxf7+ Bxf7 
28.Rfe3 Bh5 29.f3 Rxd3 30.cxd3 Qh1+ 31.Ke2 Qh2+ 32.Ke1 Re5 33.Re2 Qh1+ 34.Kd2 Qxf3 35.Qe1 Qxe2+ 
36.Qxe2 Bxe2 37.Kxe2 Ra5 38.Be7 Kf7 39.Bd8 Rxa2+ 40.Ke3 c6 41.c4 b5 42.cxb5 axb5 43.d4 b4 44.Kd3 
b3 45.Kc3 b2 46.Kc2 0-1