Credits

There is one credit that doesn't have to do a lot with chess programming, but it can't be forgotten. Now I finally understand why book writers always have dedications to their spouses/children/families in their books.

  • My girlfriend. Even though she is not a programmer, nor particularly interested in computers, I could not have written this chess engine without her. Just the fact that she's around when times are not the best, would be enough in itself, but she takes care of so much stuff in and around the house that without her, I wouldn't have even had the time to consider a project like this. In addition, she also helped in the development of the engine by listening to me blabbering about it, and then saying things like: "Maybe I'm asking a stupid question, but...",which helped me to avoid some stupid mistake more than once.

Many people on the Talkchess.com forum have provided insights and assistance that greatly helped in the development of this chess engine. Using their experience and information that has collected there over the years (and was posted as replies to my questions), I was able to either avoid many bugs, wrong implementations, or to improve existing code to work better, faster or cleaner. Thanks to all of these people. Below is a list of people who I particularly remember for one or more contributions (in no particular order).

  • Richard Allbert (better known as BlueFever Software, author of VICE): his "Programming a Chess Engine in C" (or the Javascript version) series are legendary in the chess programming community. Richard may have instructed an entirely new generation of chess programmers.
  • Terje Kirstihagen (author of Weiss): for the friendly Perft speed competition between an early version of Rustic and Weiss, to optimize make(), unmake(), and the move generator speed. And for his encouragement to keep going, by posting in my "Progress on Rustic" topic.
  • Fabian von der Warth (author of FabChess): for giving helpful information about the Rust programming language, which were very useful in speeding up the early versions of the engine.
  • H.G. Müller (author of FairyMax, MicroMax, and others): especially for explaining some improvements with regard to TT usage, and general assistance by patiently answering questions he must have seen countless times over the years.
  • Maksim Korzh (author of Wukong and BBC): for writing a great video series in the same vein as the one written by Richard Allbert. While the series covers known ground, the perspective can be just from a different enough angle to make something 'click'.
  • Rasmus Althoff (author of CT800): for assisting in optimizing Rustic's position repetition detection, and getting rid of some unneeded stuff in the alpha-beta and QSearch functions (and for providing many tidbits of useful information).
  • Martin Sedlák (author of Cheng), and Eric Madsen (MadChess): Thanks for the pointers that put me on the right track to find out why TT Move sorting wasn't performing as expected.
  • Ronald de Man (author of the Syzygy tablebases, CFish and RustFish): for helping to untangle the mess within my head regarding Principal Variation Search.
  • Taimo (author of Monchester): for pointing out a potential variable underflow problem within the time management, that made Rustic crash in debug-mode.
  • Sven Schüle (author of Jumbo, KnockOut, Surprise) for pointing out some lines of redundant, and thus confusing code in Rustic's search and qsearch functions.
  • Thomas (Lithander, author of MinimalChess): for the engaging discussions regarding (chess) programming, and providing another stable engine with compiles especially for me to test against.
  • Ed Schröder (author of Rebel and Gideon) and Robert Hyatt (author of Cray Blitz and Crafty): for still hanging around chess forums, answering questions, even after writing chess engines for 40 or 50 years.

I always wanted to be "one of them": the programmers who could write chess engines. I have always wanted to have my own, but there was always "something" that got in the way of writing it. Now it's done: even though it is not very strong yet, I wrote my own chess engine from scratch. It was a long process and lots of work, but thanks to the help of the chess programming community, it went relatively smoothly. Thanks guys.