Ronald de Man

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Ronald de Man, alias Syzygy,

a Dutch mathematician, computer scientist and IP lawyer, in the 90s researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology, competitor at the International Mathematical Olympiad 1990, winning the Silver medal [1] , and the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest 1995, to win Bronze within the ARoMA team from Delft University of Technology [2] [3] . He is co-developer of the Linux desktop environment and graphical user interface GNOME [4] , and as chess programmer author of the chess and Antichess [5] playing program Sjaak, which plays at FICS under the handle TrojanKnight [6] [7] [8]. He ported Stockfish to plain C, dubbed CFish, and to Rust as Rustfish.

Bloom Filter#

Ronald de Man revealed the trick to speed up repetition detection with a Bloom filter, implemented as a small hash table indexed by some lower bits of the hash-key, to increment a counter while entering and decrement the counter while leaving a node [11] [12] .

Syzygy Bases#

In April 2013, Ronald de Man published his Syzygy Bases [13] , a compact endgame tablebase of up to six pieces. It consist of two sets of files, WDL files storing win/draw/loss information considering the fifty-move rule, for access during search, and DTZ files with distance-to-zero information for access at the root [14] [15] .

Selected Publications#

[16]

• Ronald de Man (1995). On Composants of Solenoids. Fundamenta Mathematicae 147, pdf [17]
• Ronald de Man (1999). The Generating Function for the Number of Roots of a Coxeter Group. Journal of Symbolic Computation, Vol. 27, No.6 [18]
• Richa Malhotra, Ronald van Haalen, Ronald de Man, Michiel van Everdingen (2003) Managing service-level agreements in metro ethernet networks using backpressure. Bell Labs Technical Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2 [19] .

Forum Posts#

1995 …#

• Re: random play by Ronald de Man, rgcc, November 28, 1996 [20]
• Re: Hash functions for use with a transition table by Ronald de Man, rgcc, March 7, 1997 » BCH Hashing
• Re: computer chess “oracle” ideas… by Ronald de Man, rgcc, April 3, 1997 » Oracle
• Re: computer chess “oracle” ideas… by Ronald de Man, rgcc, April 7, 1997
• Re: triple repetition by Ronald de Man, rgcc, October 27, 1997

2010 …#

• New 6-piece tablebases by Ronald de Man, CCC, April 01, 2013 » Syzygy Bases
• tablebase caching / mmap() / page cache by Ronald de Man, CCC, October 13, 2013 » Memory, Endgame Tablebases, Syzygy Bases
• Question to syzygy author by Marco Costalba, CCC, April 24, 2016
• tablebase compression / academic integrity by Ronald de Man, CCC, May 19, 2016 [21]
• pin-aware see by Ronald de Man, FishCooking, September 14, 2016 » SEE - The Swap Algorithm, Pin, Stockfish
• DTM50 by Ronald de Man, CCC, May 22, 2018

External Links#

• syzygy1 · GitHub
• GitHub - syzygy1/tb » Syzygy Bases
• GitHub - syzygy1/Cfish: C port of Stockfish » CFish
• Syzygy from Wikipedia

Syzygy (mathematics) from Wikipedia

• ICGA: Losing Chess by Guy Haworth

References#

1. ↑ International Mathematical Olympiad - Ronald de Man
2. ↑ ‘Programmeren hoef je niet te kunnen’ - TU Delta - Weekblad van de Technische Universiteit Delft, March 16, 1995 (Dutch)
3. ↑ ACM Programming Contest World Finals
4. ↑ gnome-libs-32bit-1.4.2-11.1.x86_64 RPM
5. ↑ ICGA: Losing Chess by Guy Haworth
6. ↑ Statistics for TrojanKnight(C)
7. ↑ Re: AEGON 97/ 1st round: HIARCS lost by Ronald de Man, rgcc, April 25 1997
8. ↑ FICS Statistics - April 2004, Best Ratings - Computer List
9. ↑ Re: random play by Ronald de Man, rgcc, November 28, 1996
10. ↑ Re: computer chess “oracle” ideas… by Ronald de Man, rgcc, April 7, 1997, see also Re: mate threat extension/null move by Don Beal, CCC, October 04, 2004 » Mate Threat Extensions, Null Move and WAC booster
11. ↑ Re: triple repetition by Ronald de Man, rgcc, October 27, 1997
12. ↑ Marcel van Kervinck (2002). The design and implementation of the Rookie 2.0 Chess Playing Program. Masters Thesis, pdf
13. ↑ Re: New 6-piece tablebases by Ronald de Man, CCC, April 10, 2013
14. ↑ New 6-piece tablebases by Ronald de Man, CCC, April 01, 2013
15. ↑ syzygy1/tb · GitHub by Ronald de Man
16. ↑ DBLP: Ronald de Man
17. ↑ Solenoidal vector field from Wikipedia
18. ↑ Coxeter group from Wikipedia
19. ↑ Metro Ethernet from Wikipedia
20. ↑ Randomness in move selection by Robert Hyatt, rgcc, December 01, 1996
21. ↑ Victor Zakharov, Michael G. Malkovsky, Vladislav Y. Shchukin (2016). Compression of underdetermined data in a 7-piece chess table. Moscow University Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics, Vol. 40, No. 1

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