Qianhong Community

[H.G.Muller]

I finally got to converting my general variant engine 'Fairy-Max' to Xiang Qi. This was a bit outside the parameter range of the Chess variants Fairy-Max was designed for, because of the compartimentalization of the board, which is unique to Xiang Qi, and the deviating repetition rules and absence of stalemate. So I made a version specifically tailored for Xiang Qi, which I called MaxQi.

MaxQi is a WinBoard engine, i.e it communicates its moves in WinBoard protocol. This is a text interface, which you could run for the command line, (with the additional non-WB command "p" for printing an ascii board), but it can also be run with the graphical interface of WinBoard / XBoard. For Linux there is also XiangqiBoard, with a more traditional Oriental representation of the board, but I have not tried that yet, as I normaly run Windows, not Linux.

MaxQi can be downloaded from my website (source + Windows executable).

I know two other Xiangqi WB engines, HoiXiangqi and TJxiangqi. MaxQi crushes HoiXiangqi, and is probably somewhat weaker than TJxiangqi. (I have not run enough games to accurately determine that.) Repetition rules remain a problem for all these engines; MaxQi uses a minimalist approach (it is related to the world's smallest chess program 'micro-Max', which measures less than 2000 charaters of source code). It only plays repetitions when the alternative leaves it more than a Horse or Cannon down, as I assume this is a decisive avantage for the opponent anyway.

My final aim is to produce the smallest stand-alone Xiang Qi program, similar in size to micro-Max. I don't know what the current World record is for smallest Xiang Qi program (source-code wise), but I hope I can beat it!

[Jeremy]

Cool. I'd like to check it out, when I dig out of school work (I'm on the last semester for my masters degree--woohoo!).

Do you mind posting a link to your home page? I got there by typing it in from the file URL, but a link would be handy...

[H.G.Muller]

I added my homepage to my profile. I did not have time to make ny page about MaxQi there, though, or even to include it in my page of downloads. So the only links to the MaxQi downoad are actually from here and from the TalkChess forum.

[Jeremy]

"In those days you had to solder your own computer together from chips, if you wanted to have one at home."

Sometimes I think I was born too late. At least I got to experience monochrome monitors and 8088 & 80386 assembly programming.

[H.G.Muller]

I have started writing a serious XiangQi engine (MaxQi was more or less meant as a joke, to see how small a XiangQi engine could be), where I did not impose myself any size limitations. It uses WinBoard protocol, and its name is HaQiKi D (pronounced as Ha-Tsee-Kee-Day).

The most recent version of this engine can be downloaded from

http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/HaQiKiD.exe

It is not very strong yet (although much stronger than MaxQi), but I have only been at it for 2 weeks now, and it still needs a lot of evaluation tuning.

I also tumbled on an engine called XQWLight authored by Morning Yellow, which is also the author of Elephant Eye. XQWLight is his "minor" engine, very basic, and written for educational purposes. But its very well-tuned evaluation still makes it quite strong. The nice thing was that its AI routine was separately available as source code, as a HOXChess plugin. This made it very easy for me to put them into my WinBoard engine as a replacement for their own AI, making a WinBoard version of XQWLight. With permission of Morning Yellow this engine is now available under the GPL from my website;

http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/XQWLight.zip

Currently it is the strongest free native WinBoard engine that has been released in public.

Another point of interest is this:

I noticed that the Elephant-Eye Qianhong plugin is not a specialized executable, but an adapter UCCI2QH which invokes the UCCI version of Elephant Eye. It can presumably be configured (through the UCCI2QH.INI file) to invoke any other UCCI engine as well, by replacing the name ELEEYE.EXE in this .INI file by the name of the exectable of that engine. This would mean any UCCI engne can run as a Qianhong plugin, and through the use of the QH2WB adapter thus also as a WinBoard engine.

[H.G.Muller]

I just released a greatly improved version of my serious XQ engine, HaQiKi D 1.3. It now replaces the old version at the same download link ( http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/HaQiKiD.exe ).

Because I now succesfully implemented the search technique of Late-Move Reductions (there was a crippling bug there before, so I could not use it), it greatly increased its search depth, and now ranks just under Elephant Eye 3.1 in the list of UCCI engines I have.