MacChess - Dedicated to chess on Mac

Testimony

What people have to say about this site:

Thanks for the file and for your fine website.
30/04/2006 - Dave

You have a interesting
website. Keep on doing the good work.
24/02/2006 - Philip

This page is also not quite up to date. Fruit, Glaurung and Scorpio are not mentioned, as far as I can see. Of course there are also dozens of weaker engines missing, but most of these are probably not very interesting.
20/08/2005 - T.

Edit: Thanks for the comment, I added them...

First, I would like to say that I appreciate the work that you are doing to facilitate the upleveling of the quality of computer chess play. And, I VERY much appreciate that you are working on the Macintosh platform.
31/05/2005 - Pi

Un petit salut du Québec! J'ai visite ton site web: excellent! Enfin un passionné des échecs sur Mac
03/09/2004 - Philippe

I've found your web site original and quite interesting
31/07/2004 - Denis

It is interesting to finally see a page about chess engines available for the mac.
18/05/2004 - Jeff

Nice site btw :)
17/05/2004 - Joshua

pas mal de tous. Very interesting stuff indeed, please keep it updated.
14/05/2004 - Andreas

as a MacOS chess enthusiast, I'm happy to see your new web site.
13/05/2004 - name withheld

A blast from the past

Finger it at freechess.org:

Finger of Belofte(C): rating RD win loss draw total best Blitz 742 50.9 11 70 0 81 827 (30-Nov-2004) Lightning 1164 305.0 0 2 0 2 Total time online: 14 hrs, 11 mins % of life online: 13.0 (since Sun Nov 28, 01:43 CET 2004) Timeseal : Off 1: I am a computer, running on a Dual G4 1.25 Ghz 2: I am not strong though, rated around 700 elo but improving 3: You can find more on www.internetcontact.be/~macchess 4: I do not have opening books, no endgame knowledge, no nothing.... 5: I play regular chess. Other variants will be added later. 6: I will not play against abusers.... and only rated games. For now.

Belofte also plays on freechess.org under the same name. You can meet it there during weekdays in between 20.00 CET and 06.00 CET.

The name 'Belofte' is a dutch translation of 'promise'. The program will at some point be the strongest available. At this point, it scores around 1100.

The main concept behind 'Belofte' is not to be yet another chess program but to change some fundamentals in chess programs. Most chess programs work by selecting the best move according to evaluation and search. 'Belofte' is different in that. It will select amongst one of the good moves according to a certain desire. It changes fundamentally from the traditional minimax algorithms; it does not retain the best move in a certain position, but a series of plausible moves in a position.

For that, it "will" analyse the games of the opponent to see what moves he/she will play and uses these moves in its analysis. This part is not implemented yet.

I do not throw away all chess development concepts:

What is implemented is:

Alpha-beta
Quiescence
Opening books
Iterative deepening
Zobrist inspired hash keys

What will be implemented in the future is:

Transposition tables
Endgame tablebases
Analysis mode

Getting started instructions

The downloaded version will work out of the box. If you want to use it under xboard or winboard, you will need an opening book. Belofte is capable of creating its own opening book. It needs an input PGN file to start with.

You can find collections of pgn files at following sites: http://www.chessopolis.com/chessfiles/pgn_openings.htm, http://www.pgnmentor.com/files.html, http://www.very-best.de/Download.htm, ... or search on google for more. There are thousands of games to download.

On the command-line type:

createbook pgnfile.pgn

Where pgnfile.pgn is an existing pgn file which is residing next to the program. It will take a long time, so start with a small pgn file. Once finished, quit the program. Now you will be able to use the program from within xboard or winboard.

Internet version (0.2.8 - 0.3.0)

The internet version can sometimes be slightly newer as I am working at version 0.3.0.

Press releases

Following press releases were made about this site:

14/05/2004 - news: fr.rec.jeux.echecs

Nouveau site sur les Echecs sur la pomme

Le site est en Anglais, mais je ne suis pas contre la traduction. Si qqn veut faire la traduction, il/elle est bienvenu.

13/05/2004 - news:rec.games.chess.computer

New dedicated Mac chess site

Sorry about spamming this newsgroup. But it is chess related and it answers some questsions that are asked from time to time in this newsgroup.

I intend to complete it with some information about compiling and running Xboard applications and with other information that could be useful for most users.

http://macchess.internetcontact.be/

Hope it helps some people,