Betsy

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[ Hurricane Betsy [1] Betsy,

a WinBoard compatible chess engine by Landon Rabern, written in C with a little Assembly, released in September 2000 [2]. Originally written in Pascal with its own text interface it was rewritten in C using rotated bitboards. Betsy applies PVS with null move pruning, and various standard and some aggressive non-standard extensions and reductions. According to a former Arena site, Betsy was the first published chess engine able to play Chess960 [3], and was therefore Arena partner engine.

Neural Networks#

Quote by Landon Rabern [4]

As a child, I was obsessed with machine intelligence. I coded a strong chess AI (codenamed Betsy) and experimented with using [neural networks](Neural_Networks "Neural Networks") in Betsy, both for the [static evaluation](Evaluation "Evaluation") at [leaf nodes](Leaf_Node "Leaf Node") and within the [tree](Search_Tree "Search Tree") for [pruning](Pruning "Pruning"). The networks learned from self-play to get about as good as my hand-tuned functions (discounting the slowdown incurred by [sigmoid evaluation](Pawn_Advantage,_Win_Percentage,_and_Elo "Pawn Advantage, Win Percentage, and Elo")). I concluded that to do better, I would need to use raw game state data instead of the set of features I preselected as network inputs; unfortunately, this was 2000 and I did not have nearly enough processing power to do so.

C# Port#

As of 2014, Landon Rabern started to port Betsy to C#, available as open source engine under the MIT License at GitHub. All the major components of a chess engine are there, just not a tuned evaluation [5]. The board class embeds an 8x8 board and the Bitboard board-definition, and implements rotated bitboards. The search is implemented using a derivation chain of classes, the abstract base Brain, TranspositionTableBrain ( Transposition Table, Iterative Deepening), and the concrete BasicAlphaBetaBrain ( Alpha-Beta), NullMoveBrain ( Null Move Pruning) and MTDfBrain ( MTD(f)) classes.

Forum Posts#

• Re: C or C++ for Chess Programming? by Landon Rabern, CCC, August 18, 2000
• Betsy 5.0 is now winboard compatable by Landon Rabern, CCC, September 06, 2000
• Betsy 5.26 by Landon Rabern, CCC, July 06, 2001
• Re: FRC_TheBaron_101 Vs Fritz8 (Castling vs Not Castling rules) by Landon Rabern, CCC, June 24, 2003
• Betsy in Arena by Mark Loftus, CCC, September 13, 2003
• Betsy 6.5.1 by Landon Rabern by Norbert Raimund Leisner, CCC, August 21, 2008

External Links#

Chess Engine#

• Index of /chess/engines/Norbert’s Collection/Betsy by Norbert Raimund Leisner, hosted by Kirill Kryukov
• Betsy from WBEC Ridderkerk ( Internet Archive)
• Betsy 6.51 Nobook in CCRL 40/2
• landon rabern - about
• Betsy Fischer in CCRL 40/4 FRC
• GitHub - landon/Chess: Beginnings of a port of Betsy to C#

Misc#

• Betsy from Wikipedia
• Betsy (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
• Betsy (dog) from Wikipedia
• Hurricane Betsy from Wikipedia
• Tropical Storm Betsy (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
• Bitch - You Want It You Got It (Betsy Album) (1988), YouTube Video

References#

1. ↑ Hurricane Betsy in the Gulf of Mexico in September of 1965 as taken by the TIROS-8 weather satellite. Source: NOAA Photo Library, September 4, 1965
2. ↑ Betsy from WBEC Ridderkerk ( Internet Archive)
3. ↑ Der Chess960-Express ist nicht mehr aufzuhalten, Chess Tigers Training Center, July 20, 2005 (German)
4. ↑ landon rabern - about (2019)
5. ↑ GitHub - landon/Chess: Beginnings of a port of Betsy to C#

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