crafty

Crafty

Original author(s)	Dr. Robert Hyatt
Stable release	23.4[1]
Type	Chess program
License	Open-source, with restrictions
Website	http://www.craftychess.com/

Crafty is a chess program written by UAB professor Dr. Robert Hyatt. It is directly derived from Cray Blitz, winner of the 1983 and 1986 World Computer Chess Championships.

Crafty recently finished in second place in the 2010 Fifth Annual ACCA Americas' Computer Chess Championships. Crafty lost only one game to the first place winner Thinker.

Crafty also finished in second place in the 2010 World Computer Rapid Chess Championships. Crafty won seven out of nine games, finishing just behind the first place winner Rybka by only ½ point.

In the World Computer Chess Championships 2004 Crafty took fourth place with the same number of points as the third place finisher, Fritz 8, despite running on stronger hardware than all other programs. On the November 2007 SSDF ratings list, Crafty was 34th with an estimated Elo rating of 2608.^[2]

Crafty uses the Chess Engine Communication Protocol and can run under the popular chess interfaces XBoard, Winboard, and Arena.

Crafty is written in ANSI C with assembly language routines available on some CPUs, and is very portable. The source code is available, but the software is for "personal use" only.

Crafty pioneered the use of rotated bitboard data structures to represent the chess board, and was one of the first chess programs to support multiple processors. It also includes negascout search, the killer move heuristic, static exchange evaluation, quiescence search, alpha-beta pruning, a transposition table, a refutation table, an evaluation cache, selective extensions, recursive null-move search, and many other features (cf manual). Special editions of the program include enhanced features such as an opening book, positional learning, and an endgame tablebase.

Crafty was one of the programs included in the SPEC CPU2000 benchmark test.^[3] It is also included as an additional engine in Fritz.

References

1. ^ "Crafty Chess". craftychess.com. http://www.craftychess.com/. Retrieved 2010-08-18. 
2. ^ "The SSDF Rating List". Swedish Chess Computer Association. 2007-11-03. http://ssdf.bosjo.net/list.htm. Retrieved 2008-05-05. 
3. ^ "186.crafty: SPEC CPU2000 Benchmark Description". spec.org. Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/CINT2000/186.crafty/docs/186.crafty.html. Retrieved 2010-05-11. 

External links

• Dr. Robert Hyatt's home page
• Crafty on ftp server
• rpm file for linux
• Crafty Command Documentation
• Crafty Chess page (Latest Version Downloads)
• Graphics suitable for Crafty's annotateh command
• Play against Crafty in your browser
• Interactive Online Version of Crafty Chess Engine

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