Joanna

Joanna,

the first Polish chess program developed from 1992 to 1994 by Adam Kujawski as part of his masters thesis at University of Warsaw [1]. First written in Turbo Pascal and re-written in C, Joanna has been revived by Jim Ablett, who added Chess Engine Communication Protocol support to the version which played the PCCC 2002. The published source applies plain alpha-beta search with aspiration windows at the root, but no classical iterative deepening. Instead, a leading two ply search is used to calibrate the final depth of the main search, dependent on the average thinking time. Its evaluation concepts such as king-piece tropism, are partly adopted in Evaluation Function Draft. Following point values were defined to determine the material balance: Pionek = 100, Skoczek = 290, Goniec = 310, Wieża = 500, Hetman = 950 and Król = 20.000. The thesis further mentions a learning approach adopted from Bebe, dubbed BeBe+, utilizing a Persistent Hash Table [2].

Publications

Adam Kujawski (1994). Programowanie gry w szachy. Masters thesis, University of Warsaw, pdf