New Spartan-Chess engine: Sjaak

[hgm]

I received a new entry for the upcoming Spartan-Chess tourney: Sjaak.

It is currently playing test games against Fairy-Max at http://80.100.28.169/spartan/spartan.html . After 50 games it will be paired with ChessV, and then Oberon.

[Richard Allbert]

Reminds me... I'll have the link to the corrected Catalyst for you tomorrow

Richard

[Vladimir Xern]

I have to wonder, is this the same Sjaak by Syzygy, a.k.a. TrojanKnight on FICS? If so, it's a true variants virtuoso.

It was one of the only suicide chess engines that could challenge ascp, and it also pioneered quite a few mainstream atomic chess openings.

However, it disappeared from FICS two years ago, so this question is more a flight of fancy than anything.

[Evert]

Nope, no relation.

It is designed with the idea that it'll be able to play any chess-like game though. At the moment the piece and rule descriptions have to be hard coded, which I've done for standard Chess, Spartan, Knightmate, Maharaja and the Sepoys, Makruk and Shatranj (although it's missing a few details for playing Shatranj properly).

At the moment I seem to have broken something in the code for promotion to king though... debugging that now.

EDIT: Urgh... bitscan != popcount. Fixed now though.

[marcelk]

Nope, no relation.

If there is no relation with Ronald's program, then why is it called Sjaak and not something unique?

[Evert]

Very simple reason, actually, if you think about it.
There didn't seem to be an active program of the same name when I did a quick search for what could be a good name. I briefly considered "Jacques" instead (with the same logic to the name) but decided I might as well go with something Dutch instead.

[marcelk]

Very simple reason, actually, if you think about it.
There didn't seem to be an active program of the same name when I did a quick search for what could be a good name. I briefly considered "Jacques" instead (with the same logic to the name) but decided I might as well go with something Dutch instead. ;)

Will you rename it now that it causes confusion? `Sjaak' is well-established in Loser's Chess / Giveaway Chess, active or not, e.g. it is listed as a key-program in the field by ICGA: http://ilk.uvt.nl/icga/games/losingchess/

[Evert]

I'm somewhat reluctant to name it something very different, simply because the SVN repository is called "Sjaak" (not a decisive reason obviously) and it's a bit of a hassle. But I probably ought to at least tweak the name if and when I do a proper release of the program (with website and all).