Crafty is a
chess program
In computer chess, a chess engine is a computer program that analyzes chess or chess variant positions, and generates a move or list of moves that it regards as strongest.
A chess engine is usually a back end with a command-line interface with ...
written by
UAB professor Dr.
Robert Hyatt, with continual development and assistance from Michael Byrne, Tracy Riegle, and Peter Skinner. It is directly derived from
Cray Blitz Cray Blitz was a computer chess program written by Robert Hyatt, Harry L. Nelson, and Albert Gower to run on the Cray supercomputer. It was derived from "Blitz" a program that Hyatt started to work on as an undergraduate. "Blitz" played its firs ...
, winner of the 1983 and 1986
World Computer Chess Championships
World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) is an event held periodically since 1974 where computer chess engines compete against each other. The event is organized by the International Computer Games Association. It is often held in conjunction with ...
. Tord Romstad, the author of
Stockfish
Stockfish is unsalted fish, especially cod, dried by cold air and wind on wooden racks (which are called "hjell" in Norway) on the foreshore. The drying of food is the world's oldest known preservation method, and dried fish has a storage lif ...
, described Crafty as "arguably the most important and influential chess program ever".
Crafty finished in second place in the 2010 Fifth Annual ACCA Americas' Computer Chess Championships. Crafty lost only one game, namely to the first-place winner, Thinker.
Crafty also finished in second place in the 2010 World Computer Rapid Chess Championships. Crafty won seven out of nine games, finishing just behind the first-place winner Rybka by only ½ point.
In the World Computer Chess Championships 2004, running on slightly faster hardware than all other programs, Crafty took fourth place with the same number of points as the third-place finisher,
Fritz 8. On the November 2007
SSDF ratings list, Crafty was 34th with an estimated
Elo rating
The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in zero-sum games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor.
The Elo system was invented as an improved ch ...
of 2608.
Crafty uses the
Chess Engine Communication Protocol and can run under the popular chess interfaces
XBoard and
Winboard.
Crafty is written in
ANSI C with assembly language routines available on some CPUs, and is very portable. The source code is available, but the software is for "personal use" only and redistribution is only allowed under certain conditions.
Crafty pioneered the use of rotated
bitboard data structures to represent the chess board, and was one of the first chess programs to support multiple processors. It also includes
negascout search, the
killer move heuristic, static
exchange evaluation,
quiescence search,
alpha-beta pruning, a
transposition table, a
refutation table, an evaluation cache, selective extensions, recursive null-move search, and many other features (
tp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt/documentation/crafty.man cf manual. Special editions of the program include enhanced features such as an
opening book, positional learning, and an
endgame tablebase.
Crafty was one of the programs included in the
SPEC CPU2000 benchmark test.
It is also included as an additional engine in
Fritz.
Graphical front-ends
*
GNOME Chess
References
{{reflist
External links
Dr. Robert Hyatt's home pageCrafty Download placeCrafty Chess page (Latest Version Downloads)
Chess engines