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Paderborn, Germany, 27.2.2002 – 3.3.2002
Every year this international computer chess event is held in the city of Paderborn, which over the past 30 years has become one of the leading German centers for Computer Technology. This development is closely connected with the name of Heinz Nixdorf. The organiser of the tournament is Ulf Lorenz of the University of Paderborn, who is also the author of the program P.ConNerS (see below).
Organiser Ulf Lorenz
The 16 participants of this year's seven-round tournament are listed below. The winner was the German program Shredder, which scored 6 points. Shredder won all its games except for one, which it lost to Fritz. The Dutch-German program Fritz came second with 5.5 points, followed by Comet (4.5). All three are available in the ChessBase shop.
Winner Stefan Meyer-Kahlen, author of Shredder
Click to enlarge
Here are all the games in PGN notation (16 KB zipped)
Comet
Design and implementation in 1991 originally guided by GNU chess 3.0. search
algorithm based on alpha-beta search, triggered by a home-made modification
of the MTD driver. uses 3 hash tables (transpositions, evaluation & table-base-cache).
(recursive) Null-Move-Heuristic with reduction=2 and 1. 2 knowledge based cuts
a depth 1, positional learning function, compatible to Ch. Donningers Auto232
and Chess232, reads and writes standard formats (EPD and PGN), supports Nalimov's
5-man endgame table bases. Available as freeware (DOS & winboard) as well
as a native Chessbase analysis engine.
Diep
Started winter 1994 with DIEP. But now i'm busy with this experimental parallel
program, it's called DIEP. Still using the same huge evaluation, from which
as far as i know it's the most extensive chess evaluation that any chessprogram
contains (although mainly middlegame/opening heuristics). Diep is now using
depth limited alpha-beta with very little extensions and no other pruning mechanisms
than double nullmove R=3, running under linux at a quad xeon from University
of Alabama, Washington.
Fritz
Fritz is build around a selective search technique known as the null-move search.
As part of its search, Fritz allows one side to move twice (the other side does
a null-move). This allows the program to detect weak moves before they are searched
to their full depth. Move generators, evaluation functions and data structures
have been designed to maximize the effectiveness of the null-move search. Fritz
is the winner of the previous computerchess world championship in Hong Kong
1995. 1993 Fritz tied for 1st place in a Blitz tournament in Munich with the
complete world elite. It scored the best computer result in the 1996 man-computer
Aegon tournament. In 1998 Fritz was leading the prestigious Swedish rating list.
It won an active chess tournament Frankfurt 1998 with a full point ahead of
36 grandmasters. Kind regards Mathias Feist ChessBase GmbH.
Gandalf
Gandalf was started around 1985 by Steen Suurballe. The program was a rule-based
selective program, which was very slow, but did surprisingly well. In 1993 Dan
Wulff joined in the work, and has been doing the opening library ever since.
In 1995 Steen decided to skip the selective search, and concentrate on the evaluation
function. The program got much stronger after this change, and although it has
become a lot faster than the prior version, it is still rater slow, when compared
with other programmes. The search was changed to a standard alpha/beta search,
with null-move reductions, and a lot of extensions. The latest version of Gandalf
is a WinBoard-compatible engine.
GromitChess
GromitChess is a C++-program, developed in a Linux-environment (Emacs, gcc).
It searches about 25000 to 50000 nodes per second on a K6/200 and tries to be
intelligent rather than fast. Attacktables are the primary datastructure (16
bit for every square and player; bit n is set if piece n attacks the square).
The search uses iterative deepening, PVS, transpositiontables, killer- and historyheuristic,
nullmove (R=2), about 10 chess-specific extensions and some pruning heuristics.
The quiescence uses a static exchange evaluator and includes some checks and
other threatening moves. Parts of the evaluation are initialized at the root
but most of the work is done at the leafnodes. You can find more information
and executables in the WWW: http://home.t-online.de/home/hobblefrank/index.htm
Ikarus
Development of Ikarus started in January 1997 when our previous program, named
"BasicChess", reached the 64kb memory limit of Borland Pascal 7.0
and its source code had grown completely cryptic. The 32-bit language Borland
Delphi 2.0 allowed us to finally use hash tables and the next year or so saw
us implement a graphical user interface and most of the usual standard search
heuristics (null move pruning, history heuristic, search extensions etc.) as
well as some advanced data structures such as a pawn- king hash table. From
March 1998 on a Winboard-compatible version has been autoplaying a variety of
computer opponents. Ikarus also got a new hand-crafted opening book. Over Christmas
1998 we added support for the endgame databases created by Eugene Nalimov; so
our program contains a port of the probing code provided by the author.
Isichess
In 1991 I started to write my first C++ Project, a Class-Lib for a DOS-Window-Manager-Interface.
Inspired from David Levy's "Computer Chess Compendum" (specially the
Article about Chess4) i started to write a chess-algorithm in bottom-up manner
(beginning with data structures like piece-sets and bitboards and fast assembler
routines to modify them). Two incremential updated redundant sets PIECESET _ControlledBy[64]
for each square and BITBOARD _ControllTo[32] for each piece are used for move
generation and evaluation purposes. The Search is a standard alpha-beta Nullwindow
search with Iterative Deepening and several thread extensions and Nullmove.
Standard Heuristics like Killer and History are used. The Leave-Evaluation performs
several tasks like extension-detection (Kingdanger, passed pawns) and sevaral
Mate in one detections. With my own C++ Class-library an implementation of a
graphical user interface for the chessprogram was a quite easy task - IsiChess
was born. Special Feature is the abilty to play simultaniously with up to ten
chessboards in separate windows.
Brutus-Experimental
Brutus-Experimental is the new chess engine written by Chrilly Donninger.
Patzer
Patzer uses the standard alpha-beta PVS search, enhanced by hashtables (4 retries
replacement scheme), recursive nullmove (R=2) with verification if only one
piece present, special pruning heuristic for ALL-nodes, various extensions.
It also uses a special material hash table to adjust the material balance values
for certain endgames where the "usual" values do not apply. It values
king safety and passed pawns rather high (too high?). It is a incremental bitboard
program with attack tables that are also used during move generation and sorting.
P.ConNerS
P.ConNerS stands for 'Parallel Controlled Conspiracy Number Search'. It has
been written by Ulf Lorenz, who is a member of Prof. Dr. Burkhard Monien's research
group at the University of Paderborn. U. Lorenz mainly works on the research
fields of domain independent selective search in game trees, and on the field
of efficient parallel algorithms for optimization problems. P.ConNerS uses a
variant of the so called 'Controlled Conspiracy Number Search' algorithm. As
a result it examines highly selective and irregular game trees. Evaluations
are done by the help of depth 2 alphabeta searches. When it runs on a parallel
machine with 60 Pentium 300 MHz processors, P.ConNerS reaches a rate of about
1.2 million nodes per second. In February 1999 it won the 8th International
Paderborn Computer Chess Championship.
Shredder
Winner of the 9th WMCCC and the 9th IPCCC 2000 in Paderborn!
Shredder has started in 1995 as a project at university. Good tournament and
test results encouraged me to spend more work in it and lead to the winning
of the 1996 WMCCC in Jakarta. Shredder has been commercially available since
then and continued to perform very well in computer chess championships. It
was 3rd in Paris 1997 and managed to finish as the runner up in the blitz championship
there. Shredder is written in ANSI-C and therefore it can easily compiled on
various hardware platforms. I think Shredder has good chances in Paderborn this
year because it is one of the strongest computer chess programs running on an
micro around.
SOS
SOS is an amateur program which was started in 1993 and has since then competed
in a number of tournaments. The newest version runs on multiprocessor systems
with a parallelized version of mtd(f) as its minimax search algorithm. SOS used
to be a relatively fast searcher and relied on outsearching the opponent. This
has changed now and more knowledge and special cases have been implemented which
slow it down. Little effort is spent on the opening book. It plays a very broad
range of openings. However it learns to avoid unsuccessful lines and tries not
to repeat lost games. It uses publicly available endgame databases.
