Blikskottel

Blikskottel is a chess engine built by Adam Oellermann. In this website, you will find details of his development, his playing strength, his history and his author. You can also download the current version. Blikskottel played his first complete games during May 2001, and was regularly beating his author before the end of the month.

Origins
Blikskottel was intended to be my entry into an online tournament organised between a few colleagues; however, Blikskottel was the only entrant that actually got written (Ernst: you flake). Blikskottel replaced LaChess, which was a first-pass version written in Delphi. Blikskottel has inherited some of the ideas and principles that were roughed out in LaChess, although the implementation is cleaner, faster and entirely in C.

The Future
I haven't worked on Blikskottel for a long time now, and given that the things I thought were lacking in the free chess scene have mostly been addressed now (especially by Arena , whose approach was much more sensible than mine!), it seems unlikely that I'll work on Blikskottel again. Besides, the codebase has been iterated to that point where it really wants a rewrite, and I seem to be struggling to muster the enthusiasm - instead, I've been working on the Deep Brew draughts engine and the AHEM Morabaraba engine .

Would you like to write your own chess engine? If you are already a programmer, this is not as hard as it may seem, and is a worthwhile challenge! Take a look at my Beginner's Guide to Chess Programming to get started.