Welcome to the homepage for the Beowulf chess engine, the game-
playing brains behind the
ChessBrain project.
The Beowulf project is headed by Dr Colin Frayn,
a senior research fellow with CERCIA,
University of Birmingham, UK in collaboration with a number of
colleagues from across the globe, to produce a strong, versatile chess program
with freely available, highly readable source code. Beowulf is published under GNU General Public Licence V2
Beowulf was designed to teach experienced programmers
how to program a strong chess engine from a well-documented, clearly-written
reference. The Beowulf chess engine is by no means finished: it's an ongoing
project. Please have a look at the code and submit bug reports and
patches. Your name will appear below in the acknowledgements list,
and also in the game documentation.
Beowulf chess engine is under continuous development. Its strength is
difficult to estimate, but estimates of version 2.0 have placed
it around 2300 ELO (International Master Standard) on a fast computer.
It has played on ICC with a rating over 2300 ELO, kindly operated by
Jason Carley. The engine itself operates in text mode. If you want to
see a graphical board then I suggest you use the highly popular
XBoard/WinBoard
by Tim Mann.
Tiny Opening Book [1536 pos, 20k]
WindowsUnix
Small Opening Book [55121 pos, 84k]
WindowsUnix
Medium Opening Book [12350 pos, 200k]
WindowsUnix
Large Opening Book [43045 pos, 760k]
WindowsUnix
Huge Opening Book [135730 pos, 2Mb]
WindowsUnix
The following people have helped to varying extents on the Beowulf project.
Dann Corbit - Dedicated many many hours work to testing and gave me much
invaluable advice.
Ron Murawski - Countless useful comments, mainly on the evaluation code,
and a number of substantial rewrites of other sections of the code.
Carlos Justiniano - For his interest in Beowulf through the ChessBrain
project.
Bob Hyatt - The source code to his strong program Crafty was an invaluable
resource when I was in the preliminary stages of coding.
Ernst Heinz - His page on bitboard programming helped me to understand the
concept.
Eugene Nalimov - For his incomprehensible, but yet vital endgame tablebase
code
Andrew Kadatch - For the compression code which works with the EGTBs
Jim Monaghan - For a great many comments on Beowulf matches, and many tips
on improving the engine's strategic play.
Tim Foden - Helped with one or two compatability problems and testing.
Gian-Carlo Pascutto - For many useful comments and suggestions on the code,
especially the move ordering.
Remi Coulom - Many useful suggestions and tweaks to the code, especially
concerning the hashtable.
Makoto Matsumoto, Takuji Nishhimura and Shawn Cokus - For the random number
generation code used in some earlier versions.
Oliver Brausch - For the Bioskey() function, taken from his engine Olithink,
with permission.
Jason Carley - For running Beowulf on ICC.
Alyona Sinkovich - For kindly providing a translation of this page into Belorussian
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