Summary
DarkThought 1 is a bitboard-based chess program developed at the University of Karlsruhe that has successfully participated in all world championships since 1995. On a 500 MHz Compaq Alpha-21264 XP-1000 workstation with 256 MB RAM, DarkThought routinely reaches speeds of 400 K nps (nodes per second) in the middlegame while peaking at over 1.4 M nps in the endgame.
The article describes the design and inner structure of DarkThought. To this end, it presents detailed accounts of the chess engine while elaborating on some of its innovations: rotated bitboards, a fully programmable leaf-node evaluation function, and versatile searchparameterization.
The appendix is an updated reprint of our article “How DarkThought Plays Chess” as published in the ICCA Journal 20(3), pages 166–176, September 1997.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Heinz, E.A. (2000). How DarkThought Plays Chess. In: Scalable Search in Computer Chess. Computational Intelligence. Vieweg+Teubner Verlag, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-90178-1_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-90178-1_13
Publisher Name: Vieweg+Teubner Verlag, Wiesbaden
Print ISBN: 978-3-528-05732-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-322-90178-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive