ICGA Tournaments

Woodpusher is a small chess program (< 64K) of conventional design. It uses an iterative deepening alpha-beta search with PVS and aspiration window enhancements. The first version of Woodpusher was born in 1989 as part of a university project looking into null-move search techniques. True to it's origins, this new version of the program still uses the null-move throughout the search to recognize threats and to forward prune branches of the search tree. A database of attacks from and to all the squares on the board is maintained by using CHESS 4.5's bit-board implementation. These data structures are used for both generating moves and making positional evaluations. Woodpusher's position evaluation is maintained almost entirely incrementally while making and un-making moves during the search, with very little work done at the terminal nodes. The evaluation is therefore necessarily simple, but does include true measures of mobility rather than relying on piece-square evaluations.