Programmers: what's the story behind the name of your engine

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

Uralochka.

I can't see the woman behind that name. As far as I know it's the nickname of a mountain.

Hi Gabor !

In the STASI archive Uralochka means an Ekaterinburg female volleyball team !
So , a lot of women !


Take a look here:



SilvianR

Can I join the team please

[Sylwy]

Can I join the team please

OK Doc !

Just for you here's some datas from my STASI archive:

-the official site:
http://www.uralochka-vc.ru/
-postal address:
Azina Str., 23 RUS - 620027 EKATERINBURG
-phone:
[7] 343-359 37 80
-fax:
[7] 343-359 37 81
-email:
uralochkae@mail.ru
-most of the players are unmarried !!!!!!!!

Doc , be attentive please! Ekaterinburg is the ex-Sverdlovsk. Is full of FSB ( ФСБ ) agents here ! Most of Russian army industry here is (Kalasnikov & so on.....) !

The girls and the city are beautiful ! Just a sample:


Regards,
SilvianR

[georgerifkin]

Thank you guys for all the replies. I hope even more programmers will answer.

[abik]

I would like to know what's the story behind the name of your chess engines.

BikJump is an obvious combination of my last name and the move of a knight (hence the jumping horse as my logo). It also sounds a bit like big jump, although most readers here would argue it has not been a major leap forward for computer chess.

[michiguel]

Thank you guys for all the replies. I hope even more programmers will answer.

Gaviota means "seagull", from the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The spirit of the engine reflects the free spirit of the fictional bird, of flying for fun and excitement, not for food. In Spanish, the book was translated to "Juan Salvador Gaviota". In addition, by wife's nickname is Gaby, so it has double meaning.

Miguel

[Gerd Isenberg]

Ok, since I will incorporate this stuff in cpw anyway, here is my contribution. My DOS-program had an Intelligent GUI and was able to play up to ten games simultaneously - in short IsiChess

[JVMerlino]

Inspired by this thread: http://www.talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39381
I would like to know what's the story behind the name of your chess engines.

Thanks

Mine's pretty obvious as well. "Myrddin" is the Welsh spelling of "Merlin", and my last name (Merlino) is the Italian equivalent of Merlin (although it has other meanings as well).

The only interesting part is that my wife didn't like the name, and so I promised her that, once my engine "got strong enough", I would change the name to Gleep, after the green dragon in the "Myth" series by Robert Aspirin. Sadly, we never really agreed what "strong enough" was, and so Myrddin remains. I think my 0x88 engine will always be called Myrddin, and when I either rewrite it or convert it to bitboards, I will change the name to Gleep.

jm

[Roger Brown]

Inspired by this thread: http://www.talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39381
I would like to know what's the story behind the name of your chess engines.

Thanks

Mine's pretty obvious as well. "Myrddin" is the Welsh spelling of "Merlin", and my last name (Merlino) is the Italian equivalent of Merlin (although it has other meanings as well).

The only interesting part is that my wife didn't like the name, and so I promised her that, once my engine "got strong enough", I would change the name to Gleep, after the green dragon in the "Myth" series by Robert Aspirin. Sadly, we never really agreed what "strong enough" was, and so Myrddin remains. I think my 0x88 engine will always be called Myrddin, and when I either rewrite it or convert it to bitboards, I will change the name to Gleep.

jm

Hello John Merlino,

Did you read that series of stories by Asprin? I thought that they were more enjoyable that the Thieves' World stories and I enjoyed those quite a bit.

It was a wild romp - I laughed and laughed at the demon Ahz and....well, enough off-topic ruminations.

Later.

[Dayffd]

Inspired by this thread: http://www.talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39381
I would like to know what's the story behind the name of your chess engines.

Thanks

Mine's pretty obvious as well. "Myrddin" is the Welsh spelling of "Merlin", and my last name (Merlino) is the Italian equivalent of Merlin (although it has other meanings as well).

The only interesting part is that my wife didn't like the name, and so I promised her that, once my engine "got strong enough", I would change the name to Gleep, after the green dragon in the "Myth" series by Robert Aspirin. Sadly, we never really agreed what "strong enough" was, and so Myrddin remains. I think my 0x88 engine will always be called Myrddin, and when I either rewrite it or convert it to bitboards, I will change the name to Gleep.

jm

Hello John Merlino,

Did you read that series of stories by Asprin? I thought that they were more enjoyable that the Thieves' World stories and I enjoyed those quite a bit.

It was a wild romp - I laughed and laughed at the demon Ahz and....well, enough off-topic ruminations.

Later.

+1

[PK]

My first engine, written in Delphi, has been called Hopeless, for reasons I probably don't have to explain. Then I tried to switch gradually to C, since just about every source code I read to find new ideas was in C anyway. I asked Tom Kerrigan to be able to use TSCP code for learning purposes with an option of releasing the exe. He agreed, and I released a thing called CCCP. It stood for Comparatively Complex Chess Program, but if You read this abbreviation in Russian, it means no less than USSR. It was fairly obvious that this pun has to influence the webpage design: http://www.marittima.pl/cccp BTW, the funny thing is, that it was some time before the Decembrists and Robbo/ Ippo / whatever.

Some time later I posted some stuff on Chessprogramming Wiki. There was a discussion about writing a didactic engine. Basing on a thread on the shortest possible chess engine found on this board I made a silly joke, creating a page and typing in some lousy C code that waited for input and after receiving a command printed "I resign". Three days later I looked at this page and found a more or less complete 0x88 move generator written by Edmund Moshammer. I felt more or less forced to follow up the bad joke, so we went on to cooperate on the engine. It was CPW-engine, named after the site where we,ve met.

Once it had most of the basic features, beaten the hell out of TSCP and got around 1900 Elo according to the ChessWar metric, we decided that any realimprovement would no longer be basic. Edmund took the opportunity to rewrite the move generator to bitboards, I followed the suit with the eval function and came to like this architecture after finding some funny definition of a bad bishop, The program progressed rather well, but was nameless.

Edmund wanted to call it "Chronos", I had a couple of proposals, among them "Glass" (search for "the looking glass principle" in the posts of Chris Whittlington, as this had inspired me - I wanted the engine to be a sophisticated, speculative evaluator, the goal still far away). After we exhausted all the arguments, there was only one way to decide the issue - a game of computer-assisted chess with a name at stake. Edmund + Fritz prevailed over me + Spike (probably because my 1.b3 was not too computer-like) and for a couple of weeks the engine had been called Chronos. Sadly, we have found an engine bearing that name, earlier and stronger, and we reverted to Glass. It has not been updated since a year, but even right now I'm running some gauntlets trying to improve over Glass 1.6. Probably they will fail yet again, but who knows...

Beside that, I embarked on a side-project called Oberon after a fairy prince from Shakespeare's play "A Midsummer Night's dream". It plays a couple of fairy chess variants (well, so far only Shatranj and Spartan Chess).