Description

  Clarabit  is a chess engine created by Salvador Pallares, it means it has no graphical interface so you will need to use some of the many free and commercial compatible interfaces available.

 Clarabit is free for personal use. Go to Downloads page and read the License and Warranty paragraph before downloading.

  Clarabit  is Winboard II Protocol and UCI Protocol compatible and it has been heavily tested in Winboard/Xboard, Arena and Chessbase guies. It should also be compatible with any other gui using these protocols.

Engine configuration is mostly do by command line parameters: 

 UCI mode parameters (hash, pawns hash, use own book and pondering) will be configured by the GUI.

 Xboard mode command line parameters are:

        hash XX                    where XX(1-4096) is the numer of MegaBytes in the Main Transposition Table.

        phash YY                 where YY(1-256) is the numer of MegaBytes in the Pawns Transposition Table.

        bookoff                      to disable use of own Opening Book.

  General Command Line parameters for both xboard and UCI:

        egbbdir DD               where DD is the directory containig endgame bitbase dll and files.

        egbbcache MM       where MM(1-32) is the number of MegaBytes for endgame bitbase cache. 

        egbboff                       to disable Endgame Bitbases.

         ics                                to enable ICC/FICS  kibitz.

    for more info and examples read the file readme.txt.

 

History

Clarabit  is my second chess engine. It is dedicated to my daughter Clara.

My first much weaker engine was Littleclara. I wrote it between July 2001 and summer 2003. Littleclara introduced me to chess programming knowledge. It is private although it played at icc and actually it only plays at chesswar just to keep it alive.

I started writing Clarabit  in summer 2006. It is just a hobby and its development is as irregular as my free time. After a few months I introduced it in chess programming comunity and it started to play regulary at Chesswar, Wbec and Dirty Dozen. This really helped me to improve the engine and to go deeper in chess programming knowledge. It is a great experience to join this comunity and I advise everyone to join us.

In Summer 2007 I decided to release a public version but I was never happy with the results. Finally I took the decisión to release in February 2008 as a initial point and from there start improving area by area  and generate new releases regulary.

 

Hope you enjoy using it!