Belle (chess Machine)
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Belle (chess Machine)
Belle is a chess computer that was developed by Joe Condon (hardware) and Ken Thompson (software) at Bell Labs. In 1983, it was the first machine to achieve master-level play, with a USCF rating of 2250. It won the ACM North American Computer Chess Championship five times and the 1980 World Computer Chess Championship. It was the first system to win using specialized chess hardware. In its final incarnation, Belle used an LSI-11 general-purpose computer to coordinate its chess hardware. There were three custom boards for move generation, four custom boards for position evaluation, and a microcode implementation of alpha-beta pruning. The computer also had one megabyte of memory for storing transposition tables. At the end of its career, Belle was donated to the Smithsonian Institution. The overall architecture of Belle was used for the initial designs of ChipTest, the progenitor of IBM Deep Blue. Origins Following his work on the Unix operating system, Ken Thompson turne ...
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Computer Chess
Computer chess includes both hardware (dedicated computers) and software capable of playing chess. Computer chess provides opportunities for players to practice even in the absence of human opponents, and also provides opportunities for analysis, entertainment and training. Computer chess applications that play at the level of a Chess title, chess grandmaster or higher are available on hardware from supercomputers to Smartphone, smart phones. Standalone chess-playing machines are also available. Stockfish (chess), Stockfish, Leela Chess Zero, GNU Chess, Fruit (software), Fruit, and other free open source applications are available for various platforms. Computer chess applications, whether implemented in hardware or software, use different strategies than humans to choose their moves: they use Heuristic (computer science), heuristic methods to build, search and evaluate Tree (data structure), trees representing sequences of moves from the current position and attempt to execute ...
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Transposition Table
{{no footnotes, date=November 2017 A transposition table is a cache of previously seen positions, and associated evaluations, in a game tree generated by a computer game playing program. If a position recurs via a different sequence of moves, the value of the position is retrieved from the table, avoiding re-searching the game tree below that position. Transposition tables are primarily useful in perfect-information games (where the entire state of the game is known to all players at all times). The usage of transposition tables is essentially memoization applied to the tree search and is a form of dynamic programming. Transposition tables are typically implemented as hash tables encoding the current board position as the hash index. The number of possible positions that may occur in a game tree is an exponential function of depth of search, and can be thousands to millions or even much greater. Transposition tables may therefore consume most of available system memory and a ...
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Check (chess)
In chess and similar games, check is a condition that occurs when a player's king is under threat of on the opponent's next turn. A king so threatened is said to be ''in check''. A player must get out of check if possible by moving the king to an unattacked square, interposing a piece between the threatening piece and the king, or capturing the threatening piece. If the player cannot remove the check by any of these options, or if using any of these options would result in the player being in check by another piece, the game ends in checkmate and the player loses. Players cannot make any move that puts their own king in check. Overview A check is the result of a move that places the opposing king under an immediate threat of capture by one (or, in rare cases, two) of the player's pieces. Making a move that checks is sometimes called "giving check". Even if a piece is pinned against the player's own king, it may still give check. For example, in the diagrammed position ...
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Rook (chess)
The rook (; ♖, ♜) is a piece in the game of chess. It may move any number of squares horizontally or vertically without jumping, and it may an enemy piece on its path; it may participate in castling. Each player starts the game with two rooks, one in each corner on their side of the board. Formerly, the rook (from ) was alternatively called the ''tower'', ''marquess'', ''rector'', and ''comes'' (''count'' or ''earl''). The term "castle" is considered to be informal or old-fashioned. Placement and movement The white rooks start on the squares a1 and h1, while the black rooks start on a8 and h8. The rook moves horizontally or vertically, through any number of unoccupied squares. The rook cannot jump over pieces. The rook may capture an enemy piece by moving to the square on which the enemy piece stands, removing it from play. The rook also participates with the king in a special move called castling, wherein it is transferred to the square crossed by the king after th ...
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Bishop (chess)
The bishop (♗, ♝) is a Chess piece, piece in the game of chess. It moves and captures along without jumping over interfering pieces. Each player begins the game with two bishops. The starting squares are c1 and f1 for White's bishops, and c8 and f8 for Black's bishops. Placement and movement The is placed on f1 for White and f8 for Black; the is placed on c1 for White and c8 for Black. The bishop has no restrictions in distance for each move but is limited to diagonal movement. It cannot jump over other pieces. A bishop captures by occupying the square on which an enemy piece stands. As a consequence of its diagonal movement, each bishop always remains on one square color. Due to this, it is common to refer to a bishop as a ''light-squared'' or ''dark-squared'' bishop. Comparison – other pieces Versus rook A rook (chess), rook is generally worth about two Pawn (chess), pawns more than a bishop. The bishop has access to only half of the squares on the board, w ...
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Counter (digital)
In digital electronics, a counter is a sequential logic circuit that counts and stores the number of positive or negative transitions of a clock signal. A counter typically consists of flip-flop (electronics), flip-flops, which store a value representing the current count, and in many cases, additional logic to effect particular counting sequences, qualify clocks and perform other functions. Each relevant clock transition causes the value stored in the counter to increment or decrement (increase or decrease by one). A digital counter is a finite state machine, with a ''clock'' input signal and multiple output signals that collectively represent the state. The state indicates the current count, encoded directly as a binary number, binary or binary-coded decimal (BCD) number or using encodings such as one-hot or Gray code. Most counters have a ''reset'' input which is used to initialize the count. Depending on the design, a counter may have additional inputs to control functions suc ...
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Processor Register
A processor register is a quickly accessible location available to a computer's processor. Registers usually consist of a small amount of fast storage, although some registers have specific hardware functions, and may be read-only or write-only. In computer architecture, registers are typically addressed by mechanisms other than main memory, but may in some cases be assigned a memory address e.g. DEC PDP-10, ICT 1900. Almost all computers, whether load/store architecture or not, load items of data from a larger memory into registers where they are used for arithmetic operations, bitwise operations, and other operations, and are manipulated or tested by machine instructions. Manipulated items are then often stored back to main memory, either by the same instruction or by a subsequent one. Modern processors use either static or dynamic random-access memory (RAM) as main memory, with the latter usually accessed via one or more cache levels. Processor registers are normal ...
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Glossary Of Computer Chess Terms
This is a list of terms used in computer chess. *For terms used in chess in general, see Glossary of chess. *For terms used in chess problems, see Glossary of chess problems. A–M N–Z References * * * {{Glossaries of sports *Glossary Computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ... Wikipedia glossaries using description lists ...
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Glossary Of Chess
This glossary of chess explains commonly used terms in chess, in alphabetical order. Some of these terms have their own pages, like '' fork'' and '' pin''. For a list of unorthodox chess pieces, see Fairy chess piece; for a list of terms specific to chess problems, see Glossary of chess problems; for a list of named opening lines, see List of chess openings; for a list of chess-related games, see List of chess variants; for a list of terms general to board games, see Glossary of board games. A B C ...
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Quiescence Search
Quiescence search is an algorithm typically used to extend search at unstable nodes in minimax game trees in game-playing computer programs. It is an extension of the evaluation function to defer evaluation until the position is stable enough to be evaluated statically, that is, without considering the history of the position or future moves from the position. It mitigates the effect of the horizon problem faced by AI engines for various games like chess and Go. Human players usually have enough intuition to decide whether to abandon a bad-looking move, or search a promising move to a great depth. A quiescence search attempts to emulate this behavior by instructing a computer to search "volatile" positions to a greater depth than "quiet" ones to make sure there are no hidden traps and to get a better estimate of its value. Any sensible criterion may be used to distinguish "quiet" positions from "volatile" positions. One common criterion is that moves exist in the position tha ...
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Unix
Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley ( BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), Sun Microsystems ( SunOS/ Solaris), HP/ HPE ( HP-UX), and IBM ( AIX). The early versions of Unix—which are retrospectively referred to as " Research Unix"—ran on computers such as the PDP-11 and VAX; Unix was commonly used on minicomputers and mainframes from the 1970s onwards. It distinguished itself from its predecessors as the first portable operating system: almost the entire operating system is written in the C programming language (in 1973), which allows U ...
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