Stobor
[ Hot Rock entered ‘Stobor’ [1] Stobor,
a private chess engine by Tom Kerrigan, reportedly commercially available under a different name(s) [2]. It is named after the bogeyman character in Robert Heinlein’s book, Tunnel in the Sky [3] . Stobor is also “Robots” spelled backwards.
Design
- Board Representation: 0x88
- Parallel Search: ABDADA
- Selectivity
- Transposition Table: Thompson (not used in quiescence search)
- Move Ordering
Stobor generates attack information (including X-ray) at the beginning of its evaluation function, utilized for positional considerations.
History
The first version of Stobor in 1993 was mainly influenced by the 1978 articles by Peter W. Frey and Larry Atkin on Chess 0.5 in BYTE magazine [7] using attack bitboards. After discussions with Bruce Moreland at ICC, the 1995 rewrite introduced Ferret or GNU Chess 3 like precomputed move tables, while the 1999 rewrite stuck with 0x88. A first version of a parallel search was written in 2002 on a dual Pentium II, optimized in 2016 for 16 cores [8]. In 2004, Stobor’s evaluation function was redesigned as mentioned.
Selected Games
WMCCC 1997, round 4 Stobor - Fritz [9]
See also
Forum Posts
- Kerrigan & Stobor by Kerrigan42, rgcc, January 04, 1996
- Stobor’s BT results… compare? by Tom Kerrigan, rgcc, May 10, 1996
- Stobor vs. Crafty by Tom C. Kerrigan, rgcc, January 01, 1997
- Going commercial, maybe by Tom C. Kerrigan, rgcc, March 04, 1997
- “How To” guide to parallel-izing an engine by Tom Kerrigan, CCC, August 27, 2017
External Links
References
- ↑ The Hot Rock Carnival Club entered ‘Stobor’, a robotic theme, in the 2016 Weston-super-Mare carnival, Photo by Geof Sheppard, November 11, 2016, Wikimedia Commons
- ↑ Stobor from Tom Kerrigan’s Home Page - Licensing
- ↑ Beware of stobor!: Robert A. Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky review by Jo Walton, November 14, 2011
- ↑ Paderborn - Tom Kerrigan’s Home Page
- ↑ Stobor from Tom Kerrigan’s Home Page - Design
- ↑ Stobor from Tom Kerrigan’s Home Page - History
- ↑ Peter W. Frey, Larry Atkin (1978). Creating a Chess Player. An Essay on Human and Computer Chess Skill, BYTE, Vol. 3, No. 10
- ↑ Good parallel speedup with ABDADA and cutoff checks by Tom Kerrigan, CCC, February 03, 2017
- ↑ Paris 1997 - Chess - Round 4 - Game 14 (ICGA Tournaments)