GeezerVison

Xiphos and Makhaira 1 Xiphos and Makhaira ¹

Graphic of Bronze Age swords, Xiphos (fig. 1-3 left) and Makhaira (fig. 4), Image from the 4th edition of Meyers Konversationslexikon (1885–90), Wikimedia Commons ↩︎

Xiphos,
an UCI compliant open source chess engine by Milos Tatarevic, written in C, licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, first released on February 28, 2018. Xiphos utilizes bitboards with BERLEF mapping (a1=56, a8=63, h1=0, h8=7) ¹. Sliding piece attacks are determined by either magic bitboards, or if compiled for BMI2 capable x86-64 processors, by PEXT bitboards. Xiphos executables are available to run under Linux, Mac OS and Windows. Still work in progress with a relatively simple evaluation function, the first Xiphos release should already be on par with engines rated around 3000 Elo on CCRL 40/4 scale ².

Contents

Acknowledgements
Selected Features
1. Search
2. Evaluation
3. Misc
Forum Posts
1. 2018
2. 2019
External Links
1. Chess Engine
2. Misc
References

Acknowledgements

Milos Tatarevic was inspired by Garry Kasparov's book Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins ³ ⁴, which evoked his childhood passion computer chess, wondering how hard it could be to develop an engine strong enough to suppress the legendary Deep Blue - giving it a try. The CPW (Thank You) and following open source engines were mentioned as further inspiration in the author's acknowledgements ⁵: