Sunsetter is a chess playing program with two versions: one made for regular chess - and one made for Crazyhouse or Bughouse Chess. Windows Executable and Linux Source Code/Makefiles available.
Description
A bughouse/w24 and crazyhouse/w23 playing program.
C , Linux/Windows, GPL. Also available in precompiled packages to start playing right away.
Categories
Board Games, Artificial Intelligence
License
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2)
Additional Project Details
Languages
English
Intended Audience
Developers, End Users/Desktop
Programming Language
C++
Registered
2002-09-03
What is Sunsetter ?
Sunsetter is a chess playing program. There are two version, one plays normal chess, the other plays chess variants called "crazyhouse" and "bughouse".
You can play it on your computer (see Downloads), or on the Internet chess servers (see Links).
Sunsetter is completely free, released under the GPL.
Why a Crazyhouse chess version ?
Programming Crazyhouse chess is an interesting challenge. The figure below shows that the huge average number of possible moves per position in crazyhouse (because you can drop all your pieces in hand on almost all squares) results in much less depth reached compared to normal chess. Because of this crazyhouse programmers face some problems today fast hardware has solved for normal chess.
Sunsetter Commands
Many of the commands can be used either
- as command argument eg. Sunsetter -hash 64
- in an initialization file named ss-[version].ini eg. hash 64
- during runtime
I. Winboard Commands
Sunsetter is designed to run under winboard or a compatible interface. WB Protover 2 is supported
II. Additional commands
- hash n is used to make the transposition table size n megs, 16 megs is default. The learn table is hardcoded to 12 megs.
- learn is used to turn on the book, and write back information about lost/won games to it ("Learning").
- book is used to turn on the book, but without learning
- tbpath s is used to set the path to the tablebase files. Up to 5-men end game table bases in Namilov format (used with permission) can be used.
III. Additional Features
- Testing: See speedtest.bat and other example .bat files on different tests you can perform on Sunsetter.
- Book creation: Sunsetter can create, like most engines, a book from PGN files. There is a batch file included to create or add lines from a file called games.pgn . But have you tried out exportBook.bat yet ? It allows you to view Sunsetter's book in Fritz for example, as a game with lots of variations.
- Search tree in Html: if you are bit familiar with programming, to look at Sunsetters search tree might be interesting. You can do that by compiling Sunsetter with #define GAMETREE set. After that, you can produce a list of html files showing which moves Sunsetter considered in a number of position in the tree !
IV. Notes on running on a chess server with winboard
For the winboard documentation see http://www-tim-mann.org
After every game, sunsetter issues gameend1 to gameend4 to the server. You can alias that to something meaningfull like seek 3 0 crazyhouse f
Please let me know about where you run the engine.
An example connection .bat file looks like
c:\winboard\winboard.exe -zp -ics -icshost freechess.org -icsport 5000 -icshelper timeseal -fd="d:\sunsetter" -fcp="sunsetter.exe"
http://sunsetter.sourceforge.net/index.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sunsetter/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sunsetter/files/latest/download