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Welcome
Welcome to the homepage dedicated to my expanding family of chess engines:
Jazz, Sjaak and Leonidas!
Jazz is a fairly standard chess program. It currently has no opening book,
and doesn't use an endgame database.
Sjaak is a much weaker chess program (Sjaak II less so than the old
version), but in addition to normal chess it
can play a (large) number of other games and chess variants.
Leonidas is intermediate between Jazz and Sjaak and was designed primarily
to play Spartan Chess (see below), but it plays some more variants.
The latest addition to the family is Postduif (Dutch for Carrier
Pigeon), which is designed specifically to play Grande Acedrex and
(eventually) Tamerlane
Chess.
Supported variants (most of them can only be played by Sjaak, unless noted
otherwise):
-
Normal chess (Jazz, Sjaak and Leonidas all play this).
-
Spartan chess,
where black and white play with different armies and black has two
kings (Sjaak and Leonidas can both play this).
-
Seirawan chess,
where both sides start with an extra off-the-board piece that can be
introduced later (Sjaak and Leonidas both play this).
-
The Maharaja and the Sepoys,
where white has only one piece (the Maharaja) (needs to be played as
variant "fairy" in XBoard). In Sjaak II you need to load the
variants.txt configuration file to make this variant available.
-
Amazon chess,
where the queen moves as an amazon (needs to be played as variant
"fairy" in XBoard).
-
Knightmate,
where the king moves as a knight and the knights move as a king.
-
Berolina Chess,
where pawns move one square diagonal and capture straight ahead.
-
Shatranj,
a historic precursor of modern chess.
-
Capablanca Chess,
a variant played on a 10x8 board with two extra pieces.
-
Gothic Chess,
the same as Capablanca Chess but with a different starting position.
-
Fischer Random Chess and
Capablanca
Random Chess, which are like normal chess and normal Capablanca
chess, but with a randomised starting position (Sjaak does not
generate a starting position, however).
-
Makruk, the
Thai version of Chess. ASEAN
chess and Ai-Wok
are supported Makruk variants.
-
Pocket
Knight, like normal chess, but players have an extra knight they
can drop on the board.
-
Grand Chess,
on a 10x10 board.
-
Indian
Grand Chess, or possibly Turkish Grand Chess. On a 10x10 with
four extra pieces.
-
Burmese
chess (Sittuyin), needs to be played in XBoard with legality testing off.
-
Courier
chess, a medieval variant played on a 12x8 board.
-
Chinese chess (Xiangqi),
Black and white face eachother across the river that runs along the
board, with their kings confined to their palaces.
-
Japanese chess (Shogi),
where captured pieces can be dropped on the board to reinforce your
own army. Also supported are a number of Shogi variants (sho-shogi,
mini-shogi and tori-shogi).
-
Traditional
Mongolian Chess (Shatar), which has restrictions on how mate can
be delivered.
-
Omicron Chess,
which is basically
Omega Chess
on a slightly smaller board.
-
Omega Chess,
a variant on a 12x12 (effectively 10x10 with four extra squares)
board.
-
Grande Acedrex,
a large (12x12) mediaeval variant of chess with divergent pieces: the
Rhinoceros/Unicorn (first as Knight, then as Bishop) and the
Gryphon/Aanca (first as Ferz, then as Rook). Can be played by
Postduif.
-
Various minor variantions and challanges, including
Peasant's
revolt, Legan's chess.
The structure of Sjaak, Jazz and Leonidas is very similar. Some modules
are shared between the programs, but others are rewritten from scratch.
The programs are more like siblings than descendants. Except for Postduif,
which is more like a cousin.
Sjaak comes with a command-line tool for playing engine-engine matches
called Sjef. This uses Sjaak as a referee so it can handle all variants
that Sjaak knows about (in particular, it does not handle Seirawan chess,
although I have a work-around in mind for that).
All programs are freely available (under the terms of the
GNU General
Public Licence)
and can be used with any chess GUI that implements the UCI (Jazz) or
XBoard/WinBoard (Jazz, Sjaak, Leonidas, Postduif) protocols.
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