Dark Thought
Authors
| Person | Role |
|---|---|
| Ernst Heinz | engine programmer |
| Markus Gille | engine programmer |
| Peter W. Gillgasch | engine programmer |
Participations
| Tournament | Participants | Score | Games |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chess, 1999, Paderborn | 30 | 4.5 | 7 |
| Chess, 1997, Paris | 34 | 7.0 | 11 |
| Chess (Blitz), 1997, Paris | 22 | 5.5 | |
| Chess, 1996, Jakarta | 27 | 6.5 | 11 |
| Chess (Blitz), 1996, Jakarta | 5 | ||
| Chess, 1995, Paderborn | 34 | 7.0 | 11 |
| Chess, 1995, Shatin | 24 | 2.0 | 5 |
Descriptions
- Description given in 1999:
"DarkThought" is a full-blown 64-bit chess program based on the bitboard technology. It was developed at the Institute for Program Structures and Data Organization (University of Karlsruhe, Germany) and has successfully participated in all ICCA world championships since 1995. On a 767MHz KryoTech Alpha-21164a with 256MB RAM, "DarkThought" easily reaches speeds of 350K nps in the middle game while peaking at over 1M nps in the endgame.
"DarkThought" is a sophisticated alpha-beta searcher written in ANSI-C that uses PVS/NegaScout with state-of-the-art enhancements like various hash tables, normal and extended futility pruning, internal iterative deepening, dynamic move ordering (history+killer heuristic), recursive null-move pruning, selective extensions, and interior-node recognizers (incl. access to endgame databases).
In order to find out more about how "DarkThought" plays chess, please visit its WWW page at URL http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/Tichy/DarkThought/.
- Description given in 1997:
DarkThought is a bitboard-based chess program developed at the University of Karlsruhe that has successfully participated in all world championships since 1995. On a 500MHz DEC Alpha-21164a with 128MB RAM, DarkThought routinely reaches speeds of 200K nps in the middlegame while peaking at over 650K nps in the endgame.
DarkThought is a sophisticated alpha-beta searcher written in ANSI-C that uses PVS/NegaScout with state-of-the-art enhancements like futility pruning, internal iterative deepening, dynamic move ordering (killer+history heuristic), recursive null move pruning, selective extensions, interior-node recognizers, and interior-node endgame database access.
In order to find out more about how DarkThought plays chess, please visit its WWW page.
Thanks to the courtesy of both Digital Equipment Corp. and Kryotech Inc., DarkThought will run on a superfast 767MHz DEC Alpha-21164a during the 15th WMCCC in Paris.
- Description given in 1995:
Dark Thought is a brute-force program employing sophisticated move ordering techniques and search extensions backed by a selective quiescence search. On a DEC 3000-600 (175Mhz Alpha 21064 CPU, 64MB RAM) Dark Thought visits up to 60,000 nodes per second and reaches a non-selective, brute- force search depth of at least 8 plies in 1 minute. Its opening book contains 250,000 positions. On-line access to Thompson's endgame databases is handled by a greatly enhanced version of the public domain software by Beuckens and Hoekstra. Peter Gillgasch, the main brain behind the chess engine, wrote a prototype version of Dark Thought in Pascal in 1992. Today the program compiles and runs from the same ANSI C source files on a variety of platforms. Markus Gille and Ernst Heinz are responsible for fine-tuning the evaluation function and databases and Peter Gillagasch still maintains the chess engine. During the World Championships, Darkthought will run on the most powerful DEC Alpha workstation available.