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Bullucks

What is it?

Bullucks is an experimental chess program.
The experimental part of this chess program is, that it doesn't use any alpha/beta, min/max or any algorithm more or less equal to that. No, it is not based on the work of Shannon, and no; it doesn't pick its moves randomly (oh, and when some smartass does some strace: yeah, there are situations when the program finds 2 or more moves that are all equally good, it picks one randomly - but those are exceptions).

This release is nothing more than a recompilation under Linux with all the warnings fixed. Still contains zillions of bugs, is still extremely crappy seen from the c-coding point of view (that's also why I won't release the source-code).

Downloads

here to get the binary (i486, Linux).
here for a MacOS X binary.
here for a binary for the ARM processor
here for a microsoft windows binary

History:

may 29 (1996)
Got bored and started coding on a chess-program. didn't expect I would succeed, because of 2 previous attempts. Also thought I wouldn't work more then 3 days on it, 'cause of getting bored of the coding stuff. I was wrong... - this version only contained some "finger-shapers" like memory allocation and some very simplistic move-chosing-code. it had no user-interface, so I had to test the code in my mind to see if it works. Very ... I can asure you. Oh, yeah, this version didn't looked what moves could be done.

Jun 2 (1996)
As far as I remember; added routines that looked what moves a pion on a given position could do

aug 7 (1996)
first serious attempt on in-depth search

aug 12 (1996)
first version playing following the rules with in-depth search

aug 13 (1996)
rewrote some move-selection-code in think()

aug 19 (1996)
started coding on "rokade"-moves (v0.851Alpha)

aug 20 (1996)
reduced memory-usage (v0.852Alpha)

aug 21 (1996)
made 'm less suicidal, made 'm less predictable (v0.855Alpha)

aug 22 (1996)
corrected some bugs and enhanced one of the most important routines for the move-selection, made 'm even less suicidal, added some strategic stuff

aug 25 (1996)
rewrote & simplified & probably removed some bugs in the thinkroutine, added (yeah, again) some more strategic stuff, it seems I've removed a bug introduced a very long time ago. that the program managed to do some sort of chess-playing with that bug puzzles me totally.

sep 1 (1996)
removed a bug in the do-rokade-move routine. very strange that the compiler didn't complain about that one (non-initialized structure).

sep 8 (1996)
made its move-selection more "logical", started working on a routine that analyses how it can prevent that *YOU* (opponent) can work out your plan (!), started making the sourcecode better readable for me. may decrease the speed of everything, might also speed up things.

sep 12 (1996)
finally got the @&*#&^(!% thing compiled again. Tomorrow (or later), I'll start removing bugs and debugging and everything I hate to do but have to do :-( (first impression: probably not much debugging to do. everything seems to work) * Next release version will be v0.885Alpha (or later)

oct 9 (1996)
started again from scratch

oct 10 (1996)
recovered old sources and decided that not all code was trash :-)

oct 17 (1996)
did a first compile on my first piece of new code; it seems those pointers gonna cause me a lot of headpain :-( I think I might rewrite stuff in C++

May 2 (1999)
Retrieved the sources of 17 oct 1996 and recompiled them for Linux. Also removed the most obvious bugs, removed all the warnings and placed it on the web.

September 17 (2003)
Ported to MacOS X

For contact info, see this page.