What about Thinker?

[Xaake]

Hello!

I am quite new to the chess engine world, and are trying to navigate my way through the different engine that exists. Mostly this works well and is very interesting.

What I find that is surprising though is that so few engines seems to have dedicated homepages, this actually makes it quite hard to figure out stuff like which is the latest version and what kind of engine it is (free, open source, commercial etc.)

One thing strikes me the most though, where is Thinker? This engine seems to be free or maybe even open source, and it seems to have had a homepage on geocities (which of course does not exist anymore since geocities is closed). It is also rated really high in a lot of rating lists.

How come such a good engine is not high profile, I barely find any mention of it forums and I definitely can't find any first hand downloads for it (only on pages that acts like some kind of repositories for alot of engines).

I start to suspect that there is something wrong with this engine, like with the ones we can only mention on the hidden forum, is it so or is it simply the most underrated engine out there?

[yanquis1972]

there is something seriously wrong with it in that it's pretty much wholly defective by most user standards other than being able to play chess. it can print its evaluation of a position in some GUIs but other than that, it does not show its pv & cannot be used for analysis. so it's designed either to play against & get crushed by or for engine-engine matches. but it is certainly a unique work & incredibly strong.

i forget the link but there is some sort of legit (posted by the authors) skydrive site where the engine is available for DL.

[Xaake]

Ok, thanks for the clarification, that explains why it's not mentioned that much.

[Marek Soszynski]

Richard, you may find this link helpful...

Zarkon Fischer's Free Chess Programs: Engines
http://www.freechess.50webs.com/engines.html

[Jan Brouwer]

Hello!

I am quite new to the chess engine world, and are trying to navigate my way through the different engine that exists. Mostly this works well and is very interesting.

What I find that is surprising though is that so few engines seems to have dedicated homepages, this actually makes it quite hard to figure out stuff like which is the latest version and what kind of engine it is (free, open source, commercial etc.)

One thing strikes me the most though, where is Thinker? This engine seems to be free or maybe even open source, and it seems to have had a homepage on geocities (which of course does not exist anymore since geocities is closed). It is also rated really high in a lot of rating lists.

How come such a good engine is not high profile, I barely find any mention of it forums and I definitely can't find any first hand downloads for it (only on pages that acts like some kind of repositories for alot of engines).

I start to suspect that there is something wrong with this engine, like with the ones we can only mention on the hidden forum, is it so or is it simply the most underrated engine out there?

Thinker is the single engine I would most like to study the source code of.
From its size, strenght, and messages by one of its authors, I expect it to be a unique combination of simplicity, elegance, and playing strength.
I doubt very much that there is anything wrong with it in the above sense, so yes, it may be very underrated.

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

Hello!

I am quite new to the chess engine world, and are trying to navigate my way through the different engine that exists. Mostly this works well and is very interesting.

What I find that is surprising though is that so few engines seems to have dedicated homepages, this actually makes it quite hard to figure out stuff like which is the latest version and what kind of engine it is (free, open source, commercial etc.)

One thing strikes me the most though, where is Thinker? This engine seems to be free or maybe even open source, and it seems to have had a homepage on geocities (which of course does not exist anymore since geocities is closed). It is also rated really high in a lot of rating lists.

How come such a good engine is not high profile, I barely find any mention of it forums and I definitely can't find any first hand downloads for it (only on pages that acts like some kind of repositories for alot of engines).

I start to suspect that there is something wrong with this engine, like with the ones we can only mention on the hidden forum, is it so or is it simply the most underrated engine out there?

Thinker is the single engine I would most like to study the source code of.
From its size, strenght, and messages by one of its authors, I expect it to be a unique combination of simplicity, elegance, and playing strength.
I doubt very much that there is anything wrong with it in the above sense, so yes, it may be very underrated.

Agreed here....the current version is 5.4J as far as I'm concered,but it was never released unfortunately....
Dr.D

[karger]

I was recently playing on FICS and came across a computer account that was playing a much newer unpublished version of thinker ,5.51. It was using thinkerboard interface. It is not available anywhere as far as I know. This is just interesting info. karger