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Pocket Gopher ¹

GopherCheck,
an UCI compliant open source chess engine by Stephen Lovell, written in the Go programming language, first released in June 2016 ¹ under the MIT license. GopherCheck supports a parallel search, defaulting to one search goroutine, a type of light-weight process ² per logical core. GopherCheck is bitboard based and determines sliding piece attacks with magic bitboards with plain, homogenous arrays, which performed better than the common fancy implementations whith individual table sizes, thus less memory but variable shift while calculating the index ³.

Features

⁴

Board Representation

• Bitboards
• Plain Magic Bitboards

Search

• Iterative Deepening
• Principal Variation Search (PVS)
• Parallel Search
  • Shared Hash Table
  • Young Brothers Wait Concept
• Move Ordering
  • History Heuristic
  • Internal Iterative Deepening
  • Killer Heuristic
• Selectivity
  • Null Move Pruning with Verification
  • Mate Distance Pruning
  • Futility Pruning
  • Prune Quiet Moves if SEE < 0
  • Late Move Reductions
  • Singular Extensions
  • Check Extensions
  • Promotion Extensions

Evaluation

• Material Balance
• Tapered Eval
• Lazy Evaluation
• Piece-Square Tables
• Mobility
• King Safety
• Pawn Structure
  • Passed Pawns
  • Backward Pawns
  • Isolated Pawns
  • Doubled Pawns
  • Pawn Chain
  • Pawn Duo
• Pawn Hash Table

See also

• Gerbil
• Rodent

Forum Posts

• GopherCheck 0.1.0 released by Stephen Lovell, CCC, June 06, 2016
• Chess Engine - Gopher Check by Norbert Raimund Leisner, CCC, October 01, 2014
• GopherCheck 0.2.0 released by Stephen Lovell, CCC, January 31, 2017

External Links

Chess Engine

• GitHub - stephenjlovell/gopher_check: Concurrent UCI Chess Engine written in Go
• GopherCheck at CCRL 40/40

Misc

• Gopher from Wikipedia
• Gopher (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
• Gopher (protocol) from Wikipedia
• gopher - Wiktionary
• Alex Gopher - The Child (1999), YouTube Video

Contains vocal samples of God Bless the Child by Billie Holiday

Watch on YouTube

References