Sjeng is a
chess engine
In computer chess, a chess engine is a computer program that analyzes chess or chess variant positions, and generates a move or list of moves that it regards as strongest.
A chess engine is usually a back end with a command-line interface wit ...
written by
Gian-Carlo Pascutto
Gian-Carlo Pascutto (born 1982) is a Belgium, Belgian computer programmer. He is the author of chess engine Sjeng (software), Sjeng and Go software Leela (software), Leela, and the original author of the free and open-source Go software Leela Zero. ...
based on Faile, written by Adrien Regimbald. There are two major versions of Sjeng: the original
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
version called Sjeng (also now known as Sjeng old or Sjeng free) and Deep Sjeng, a closed source commercial version.
Sjeng ‘Free’
According to the Sjeng website “Sjeng was written by Gian-Carlo Pascutto with help from Adrien Regimbald, Daniel Clausen, Dann Corbit, Lenny Taelman, Ben Nye, Ronald De Man, David Dawson, Tim Foden and Georg von Zimmermann.” The AUTHORS file in the Sjeng distribution states that “Sjeng is written by Gian-Carlo Pascutto, based on work done by Adrien Regimbald.”
Unlike most other chess engines Sjeng supports several popular
chess variants
A chess variant is a game related to, derived from, or inspired by chess. Such variants can differ from chess in many different ways.
"International" or "Western" chess itself is one of a family of games which have related origins and could be co ...
:
Crazyhouse
Crazyhouse (also known as drop chess, mad chess, reinforcement chess, turnabout chess and schizo-chess) is a chess variant in which captured enemy pieces can be reintroduced, or ''dropped'', into the game as one's own. The drop rule resembles tha ...
, Suicide,
Losers and, when playing on a chess server,
Bughouse. Starting with
Mac OSX 10.4 Sjeng has been distributed as the engine behind the graphical “
Chess
Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to disti ...
” Mac application.
The first version with source code under the
GPL
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...
was Sjeng 7 released to SourceForge on 4/15/2000. The last open source version was Sjeng 11.2, released on 1/2/2002. With version 12 Sjeng went back to being closed source, although still free. Version 12 contained many changes, including a switch to bitboard architecture and the removal of variant support. Version 12.7 was released concurrently with version 11.2 on 1/2/2002. Several more versions were released culminating with version 12.13 on 5/3/2002.
Deep Sjeng
The next iteration of the chess engine was named Deep Sjeng 1.0 and released as a commercial program on 3/3/2003. It featured multiprocessor support and was estimated to be 200 Elo_rating, rating points stronger than Sjeng Free. The last version of Deep Sjeng won the World Computer Speed Chess Championship in 2008. Deep Sjeng is no longer for sale.
Tournaments
Deep Sjeng participated in six World Computer Chess Championships, then retired after tying for first place in the 17th Championship. Deep Sjeng actually tied for second place, however the winner, Rybka, was disqualified for plagiarism.
Sjeng won the World Computer Speed Chess Championship in 2008,
and the World Computer Chess Championship in 2009. It also won the Internet Computer Chess Tournament in 2010 and 2011.
References
External links
*
*
;Wiki
*
* {{cite web , url= https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Deep+Sjeng , title= Deep Sjeng , website= Chess Programming , series= Wiki , url-status= dead , archive-date= July 12, 2018 , archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20180712203303/https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Deep+Sjeng
Chess engines