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Sinobyl,
initially called Latista and in 2008 renamed to Sinobyl due to trademark issues ¹, is a WinBoard compliant chess engine by Eric Oldre, written in C++, and first released in 2004 ². Sinobyl, aka Latista 1.4, was one of the first engines besides Scorpio and Gambit Fruit, to use Daniel Shawul's Scorpio Bitbases. Sinobyl was later ported to C#, with rotated bitboards replaced by magics ³, released in 2014 as NoraGrace, dedicated to Nora Grace Oldre who was taken from Eric and his wife unexpectedly a few days before she was due to be born ⁴.

Description

based on Latista 1.5 ⁵

Board Representation

• Bitboards
• Rotated Bitboards

Search

• Iterative Deepening
• Aspiration Windows
• Alpha-Beta
• Transposition Table
• Move Ordering
  • Hash Move
  • Internal Iterative Deepening
  • Killer Move
  • Static Exchange Evaluation
• Selectivity
  • Null Move Pruning
    • R=3
    • Verification Search in Endgame
  • Fractional Extensions
    • Check Extensions
    • Passed Pawn to 7th Rank Extensions
    • Horizon Threat Extensions
  • Futility Pruning
  • Reductions
  • Quiescence Search

To avoid standing pat in quiescence where pieces of the side to move were just attacked and en prise, Eric Oldre introduced Horizon Threat Extensions in Latista 1.4 ⁶.

Evaluation

• Material
• Pawn Hash Table
• Piece-Square Tables
• King Safety

Pawn Shelter

• Pawn Races
• Development
• Piece Activity

See also

• NoraGrace

Forum Posts

• Bitboard board representation by Eric Oldre, CCC, January 13, 2005
• An interesting bug i found tonight in latista by Eric Oldre, CCC, January 16, 2005
• Idea i'm been using to help tune latista by Eric Oldre, CCC, January 24, 2005
• Latista 1.3 released by Eric Oldre, CCC, July 02, 2005
• Latista 1.4 released. (Rybka killer edition!) by Eric Oldre, CCC, December 23, 2005
• Latista 1.5 by Eric Oldre, CCC, January 13, 2006
• Re: new/updated engines: 2008/11/28-29 by Eric Oldre, Winboard Forum, December 01, 2008
• New open source engine in C# - NoraGrace by Eric Oldre, CCC, June 20, 2014

External Links

Chess Engine

• Index of /chess/engines/Norbert's Collection/Sinobyl 1.5 release 29.11.2008 by Norbert Raimund Leisner, hosted by Kirill Kryukov
• Latista (Sinobyl) 1.5 in CCRL 40/4
• Latista (Sinobyl) 1.5 in KCEC
• trunk/Sinobyl | SVN | Assembla (NoraGrace)

Misc

• latista - Wiktionary

latistaa - Wiktionary

• Sino- - Wiktionary
• Wordlist sinobyl... | Welsh Prose 1300-1425
• Chernobyl - Name origin | byllia (билля, grass blades or stalks)

References