Crafty
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Crafty is a chess program written by UAB professor Dr. Robert Hyatt. It is directly derived from Cray Blitz, winner of the 1983 and 1986 World Computer Chess Championships. Crafty is a very strong chess engine: its ELO rating is about 2600.
Crafty board implementation is internally based on bitboards, 64-bit data structures. The source code of Crafty, written entirely in ANSI C, is available for free, so any computer chess enthusiast can take a look at it.
Crafty uses the XBoard protocol, and can also be run with the popular free chess interfaces WinBoard or Arena (http://playwitharena.com/).
Furthermore, there are special editions, CraftySE, which allow a huge number of settings. Used with opening books, position learning function and important endgame table bases they play with a human style even on low amateur levels. This is what makes Crafty so popular.
In the World Computer Chess Championships 2004 Crafty won the fourth place with same amounts of points as the third place finisher, Fritz 8. Interestingly, if the tournament had scored three points for each win (rather than the traditional two) and one point for each draw, Crafty would have finished in third place, as it tends to avoid draws in favor of aggressive play.
Crafty is one of the programs included in the SPEC-CPU benchmark test.
External links
- Crafty FTP (ftp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt/)
- Crafty fanpage (http://www.crafty-chess.com/)de:Crafty