LaMoSca

LaMoSca

LAboratorio di MOtori per SCAcchi

"God in his wisdom made the fly.
And then forgot to tell us why."

Ogden Nash

LaMoSca ("Laboratorio di Motori per Scacchi": an acronym in Italian for "Chess Engine Lab" that means "The Fly") is a chess program that aims to show in a simple way the main components of this kind of software.

The program is a "chess engine", as it has only the game algorithms and it adopts as user interface the most widespread software, i.e. WinBoard.

LaMoSca structure is similar to TSCP, a very popular freeware chess engine. Other programs worth analyzing are MSCP">MSCP, Faile, Beowulf and Phalanx, among the simplest ones, or Crafty and GNU Chess, among the most powerful. More WinBoard Engines can be found on Frank Quisinsky or Leo Dijksman pages.

The source code has been published to allow people curious about chess programming to understand the architecture of chess engines and people interested in developing a proper project to speed up the startup phase.

Instead of the list of algorithms for a program as a whole, an incremental sequence of program versions has been published. In this way, enhancement obtained with new features introduced in the engine can be easily evaluated, either running the engine, or with standard logging e debugging tools.

The programming language is "C".

Versione italiana

Contents

(in Italian)

Links

To learn chess

Chess programming

To play chess

Italian engines

Contacts

Comments and suggestions are welcome by e-mail.

Download

LaMoSca.zip (19.9 k)

LaMoSca

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Gruppo Scacchi E Informatica, who helped me to understand the engine structure, the main algorithms and the better way to develop the program.


Last update April 17th 2005

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