The Story Behind The Engine Names ?

[Enderjed]

My engine (Valiant) has a double meaning, that being the literal meaning of the word, denoting it being a "valiant effort" yet usually in vain, which is where it conjoins to the second meaning (and also it's logo), the Valiant A38 armoured vehicle prototype. This vehicle was an absolute failure, an effort in vain if you will.
It's variants have far simpler meanings.
Valentine is named after both the early armoured vehicle (which is also it's logo), and the day it was compiled on.
Archer is not after the medieval warrior, but instead, after another failed armoured vehicle design, the Self-Propelled Archer, which was notorious for having it's armament mounted on the rear of the vehicle, in reference to the archer variant having reversed piece square tables as an elo experiment.

[Rebel]

I called my engine REBEL because it rebelled against me, for not doing the things I wanted

[algerbrex]

The name for Blunder came from the fact that when I started writing Blunder, I was a pretty bad chess player (not great now, but I'm better), and was constantly blundering. From the beginning, I planned on my engine eventually being quite strong and robust and thought it would be pretty ironic and funny to have a strong engine named blunder. And the name has really grown on me since then, so it stuck.

I normally struggle quite a bit to find names I like for a lot of my programming projects so I'm pretty happy I was able to come up with a fun, unique name for my chess engine

[hgm]

For my engines:

Usurpator (Dutch for Usurper): an idea of my brother, who felt I should try to dethrone the then #1 of the World 'Sargon'.
Joker: because during development it sometimes did moves for which I thought "you can't be serious!".
Spartacus: because it could play Spartan Chess. (And yes, I know that Spartacus was actually a Roman slave, but it sounded nice.)
Micro-Max: because it was not much more than a very small version of the minimax algorithm (and the name Mini-Max was already taken).
Fairy-Max: because it was a version of micro-Max that could handle fairy pieces (originally made to guage their values).
KingSlayer: inspired by Game of Thrones; when I first heard that word I thought it was the perfect name for a chess program.
DuckSlayer: a version of KingSlayer that can play Duck Chess.
Aramis: a version of KingSlayer that can play Musketeer Chess. (Aramis of course being the alphabetically first of the 'Three Musketeers'.)
Shokidoki: because it played Shogi, and the alternation of vowels and consonants seemed OK for making it sound Japanese.
CrazyWa: because it can play Wa Shogi with piece drops, like Crazyhouse is Chess with piece drops (which it can also play).
Inferno: because it plays Tenjiku Shogi, a shogi variant where Fire Demons are the dominant piece, worth about 20 Queens.

Then I have a general chess-variant-playing program, which is not really an engine, but is integrated in its browser-based GUI, which goes by the prosaic name 'Interactive Diagram' (which refers to the GUI).

[JVMerlino]

The story behind naming my engine Myrddin is pretty simple. The program's name is related to my last name, Merlino, which is the Italian equivalent of Merlin, which was originally spelled Myrddin in Welsh.

[Stephen Ham]

Hi John,

Myrddin is pronounced Merthin in Welsh, where the TH has the same sound as in THE.

Great name!

All the best,
-Steve-

[rainhaus]

I called my engine REBEL because it rebelled against me, for not doing the things I wanted

They'll never come back,.. with the exception of Ed Schröder and his rebel engine, now in neural design of course. not to be confused with Edward Schröder .

"Schröder ended his career as a chess programmer in 2006" with Pro Deo 1.6 it is said on the Rebel page of Wikipedia, so there is an urgent need for correction. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_(Schachprogramm)

The changeover to neural network was obviously much easier than the long-winded separation from DOS a long time ago.

O.k., so the real rebel is the engine and not the author. I can hear it quite clearly, the vociferous short comments, when Rebel rebelled especially strongly again...
.

[rainhaus]

My engine (Valiant) has a double meaning, that being the literal meaning of the word, denoting it being a "valiant effort" yet usually in vain, which is where it conjoins to the second meaning (and also it's logo), the Valiant A38 armoured vehicle prototype. This vehicle was an absolute failure, an effort in vain if you will.
It's variants have far simpler meanings.
Valentine is named after both the early armoured vehicle (which is also it's logo), and the day it was compiled on.
Archer is not after the medieval warrior, but instead, after another failed armoured vehicle design, the Self-Propelled Archer, which was notorious for having it's armament mounted on the rear of the vehicle, in reference to the archer variant having reversed piece square tables as an elo experiment.

Thanks for the clarification. Is the playing style of your engines armoured too ?

Prince Valiant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Valiant und the chess variant Valiant would also have been possibilities. http://mlwi.magix.net/bg/valiantchess.htm
.

[rainhaus]

My first engine, MinimalChess was meant to be a just a very simple "barebones" engine and at some point adding more features felt like being untrue to the original plan and the name and so I abandoned it's development. When I started to work on my 2nd engine it seemed funny to me to think I was resurrecting the old skeleton engine from it's grave. Unshackled from the constraints of minimalism and simplicity Leorik is the successor to my bare-bones chess engine MinimalChess. Nice slogan, haha. But why the name Leorik?

Well Leoric is a boss in Blizzard's Diablo franchise. It's the skeleton of a former king that is now waking the earth again summoning all kind of undead soldiers on the battlefield to help him fight the player-character. Isn't that like the king in chess who relies so much on the power of the other pieces on the board?

The reason I didn't forget about this bosses name is, however, that my two sons are named Leonard and Frederik and taking a half of both their names and putting them together gives Leorik. And it's fitting in a way because developing a chess engine, like raising a child, takes years and a lot of patience! My third baby

Clean story, apparently you are at home in the gamer universe at all! The undead scenario reminds me of the last great battle against the White Walkers with an evil Night King, but also of the Battle of Gondor, when the Shadow Army redeemed its oath and was finally released from the curse, with Aragorn, a good king. Fantasy, what a wonderful world, full of beautiful sounding names.
Quite the opposite of Stockfish. The engine plays first fiddle, but somehow doesn't smell so good. Unusual and against the line this name, yes. Well, with time you get used to everything.

More than 500 chess engines from 1379 Elo to 3534 Elo currently rank in the CCRL index list, you can't look at them all closely. But yours now has a face and immediately makes it stand out from the crowd, that's what I mean. Leoric, sounds really good and using your engine I'm sure one or two people will think of your sons.
Of course I will keep an eye on Leoric. And crack the 3000 limit

BTW, interesting the comparison between the Minic program of xr_a_y and Leoric (see his post here in this thread). Opposite tendencies I would say. He wants to purify and simplify the code and you want to free yourself from the constraints of minimalism and simplicity of the first programme MinimalChess.
.

[Enderjed]

My engine (Valiant) has a double meaning, that being the literal meaning of the word, denoting it being a "valiant effort" yet usually in vain, which is where it conjoins to the second meaning (and also it's logo), the Valiant A38 armoured vehicle prototype. This vehicle was an absolute failure, an effort in vain if you will.
It's variants have far simpler meanings.
Valentine is named after both the early armoured vehicle (which is also it's logo), and the day it was compiled on.
Archer is not after the medieval warrior, but instead, after another failed armoured vehicle design, the Self-Propelled Archer, which was notorious for having it's armament mounted on the rear of the vehicle, in reference to the archer variant having reversed piece square tables as an elo experiment.

Thanks for the clarification. Is the playing style of your engines armoured too ?

Prince Valiant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Valiant und the chess variant Valiant would also have been possibilities. http://mlwi.magix.net/bg/valiantchess.htm
.

The irony of that is that only Archer has an alright defence. Valentine and Valiant are both quite aggressive, vaguely reminiscent of the romantic meta