Season 9 of the Top Chess Engine Championship is going to start this May 1st (see the first press release). It is going to be the strongest season ever, featuring a total of 32 engines of which at least 10 engines over 3000 ELO.
There are nine confirmed newcomers this season. One of the highest rated among them is the chess engine Andscacs. As the name suggests, Andscacs is an engine born in Andorra in 2013. It is a relatively new engine on the scene, but follows a rapid development, having achieved rating of 3150 ELO.
Andscacs is entirely original engine by Daniel José Queraltó. It was inspired by open source programs like Stockfish, Crafty, Protector, Discocheck, and Gull. The author explains, “Andscacs is in alpha version, not even in beta. However, it is updated frequently with the goal to add more strength and chess knowledge”
Non-exhaustive list of the techniques used by Andscacs in no particular order includes: Aspiration window, tapered eval, check extension, multi-threading, razoring, adaptive null move pruning, principal variation search, LMR late move reduction and other reductions, hash with age, SEE Static exchange evaluation, countermoves, Double Move Refutation hash, etc.
Andscacs starts competing in TCEC this May 1st and you can follow the news on the official Facebook page
Daniel Jose Queralto at the FIDE Olympiad (photo by olympbase.org)
About the Andscacs author
Daniel José Queraltó is an Andorran computer scientist and FIDE Candidate Master. He is promoter of the Catalan Wikipedia, specially on topics related to chess, mathematics and computer science, and has featured its first article about the Abacus on March 17, 2001. For his contributions he received the Lluís Carulla award in 2013. As computer chess programmer, Daniel José is author of the UCI compliant chess engine Andscacs, his main project that started in 2013 and was released in early 2014.
FIDE profile of Daniel Jose Queralto
Andscacs on Chess Programming Wiki
