games/knightcap 3.6nb9 NetBSD

KnightCap is a chess program written for the Fujitsu AP1000+ parallel computer (running AP/Linux).

The principal differences between KnightCap and other chess programs are:

• KnightCap has an optional fully rendered 3D interface, giving a feel much more like an "over the board" game.
• KnightCap was developed to run on a parallel distributed memory machine, although it also runs on normal unix boxes.
• KnightCap does not have an opening book---instead it keeps a file (brain.dat) of losing moves and inserts them in the hash table at the start of each search. At present it has about 1500 entries, and this makes it a pretty competitive opening player.
• KnightCap learns the parameters of its evaluation function as it plays. The most dramatic example of how this helps is an experiment we conducted on FICS in which KnightCap learnt from a 1650 player to a 2100 player in just 300 games.

KnightCap now beats gnuchess consistently and is within "coo-ee" of crafty, although I think it needs deeper search or some more dramatic selective search to be truly competitive with the best micro programs.