Creating a spoon of TSCP181

[Roland Chastain]

To avoid problems with spooning a non-free engine, I might be tempted to create a very basic bitboard engine. Interested?

For me, I would follow you with interest, if it really is very basic as you promise.
I started here a discussion where I try to understand the basics of bitboards. I would like to make a kind of tutorial, with Pascal code examples.

[Ras]

I started here a discussion where I try to understand the basics of bitboards. I would like to make a kind of tutorial, with Pascal code examples.

Discussing a LISP implementation in Finnish would be even more effective in limiting the number of participants.

[brianr]

To avoid problems with spooning a non-free engine, I might be tempted to create a very basic bitboard engine. Interested?

For me, I would follow you with interest, if it really is very basic as you promise.
I started here a discussion where I try to understand the basics of bitboards. I would like to make a kind of tutorial, with Pascal code examples.

Just in case you are not familiar with this resource:
https://www.chessprogramming.org/Bitboards

[Michael Sherwin]

I'm too old to start a chess engine from scratch. And my own engines are not a simple enough starting point for a spoon. So I have started a spoon of TSCP181 by Tom Kerrigan. What is spooning? I think that I just made it up. Anyway, spooning is starting with someone else's source code and over time spooning out their code and spooning in original code while keeping a working 'framework'. It is not a fork because nothing of the original code will remain. During the spooning process the new engine will be open source. When the spooning is complete then I may or may not keep the engine open source. The final spoon though will be open source and it will have a different kind of license. The license will state that anyone will be able to use the new engine as the basis for their own engine. They must increase the playing strength by at least 100 elo before they can release it. They must keep their changes closed source. And they must acknowledge that it started as the spooned engine.

What are the thoughts about this process?

TSCP is a bad choice.
It is full of globals that make a SMP version difficult.
I would suggest a different engine as a starting point.

Yes, there are some features of TSCP that make it harder than it should be. And I do want it to be smp.