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| What is TRACE? | Downloads | Version Notes | Future Plans | Thanks | Contact Me |
TRACE began in Nov 2002 as a Winboard compatible chess engine based on Tom Kerrigan's TSCP 1.73 code with the addition of adaptive null move, hash tables, additional search extensions and Nalimov Endgame tables. She runs reliably under Fritz 5.32, Winboard, Arena and (I am told) ChessMaster 9000. When first released she searched 20x faster than TSCP 1.73... but, in all fairness, TSCP is built for simplicity, not speed.
Her playing strength is now >2500 Elo. As for style of play, she is a fairly capable tactician. Positionally, she occasionally shows promise but this is her weakest area. For example, she understands that certain endgames are drawish or dead drawn, however, if she is defending one of these positions she makes no attempt to play aggressively or swindle the opponent. On the other hand she does benefit from the use of Eugene Nalimov's 5 man endgame databases and will play those endings near perfectly.
Competitive
highlights include two 2nd place finishes at the Australasian
Computer
Chess
Championships. In March 2007,
TRACE 1.37a won the prestigious WBEC
Ridderkerk Div 2 tournament. And at the CCT9 tournament in
2007 finished =9th in a very strong field.
You can download the zipped program. It's only about 160Kb...
Yes, like most Winboard or UCI engines, TRACE is a simple text based program. To play against her, you need to download an additional chess interface. There are two free Windows chess interfaces called Winboard and Arena. TRACE will work with either. To simplify things, I recommend downloading Winboard and TRACE in one setup package.
First
attempt. Yep, I'm hopeless at
doing logos :)
This
was the second attempt
Jim Ablett made
this one. It's my
favourite.Thanks Jim!!None at present
| Tracey
Boyd |
for her encouragement, understanding and patience |
| Interbit
Computing |
generously
supplied fast hardware for the NC3
Australian
Championships. Thanks guys! |
| Tom
Kerrigan |
portions of TSCP used with permission |
| Eugene Nalimov | for his EGTB probe code, used with permission |
| Andrew Kadatch | DATACOMP 1.0 Compression routines |
| Alessandro Scotti | author of Kiwi, for his free threaded input code |
| Bruce
Moreland |
an excellent communicator of ideas |
| Leo
Dijksman |
for freely hosting TRACE on his site for almost 2 years and tireless devotion to the WBEC tournaments |
| George Lyapko | for his ladder tournament and great tips |
| Lars Hallerström | tons of exhaustive testing, good humour and encouragement |
| Normand
Blais |
author of Alex, many thanks for his Euphoria port of TSCP |
| Gian-Carlo Pascutto | for good ideas in Sjeng source code |
| Prof. Robert Hyatt | always helpful to beginners like me |
| Sammy Mitchell | author of TSEPro... an AWESOME programmer's editor |
| Geoff Westwood | author of Waster, for kindly compiling TRACE under MSVC++ 6 |
| Günther Simon | runs
the very
enjoyable RWBC
tournament |
| Heinz van Kempen | his Nunn/AEGT tournaments are excellent |
| Olivier Deville | hosts ChessWar and helps with AEGT |
| Igor Gorelikov | long running Infinite Loop tournaments |
| Gábor Szots | SzG Swiss tournament |
| Uwe
Jacoby |
created
a very cool looking tournament page (currently inactive, c'mon Uwe!) |
| Graham Banks | runs the CCRL tournaments. |
| Aussie
Authors: |
|
| Thomas
McBurney |
Aussie author of Kanguruh and Tom's Live Chess Viewer! |
| Andrew
Tridgell |
Aussie author of KnightCap, host of NC3 Australian championships and creator of Samba (!!!) |
| Shaun
Press |
Aussie
author of Fencer (and others) and organiser of NC3
Australian
championships |
| Joel Veness | Aussie author of Bodo |
| Alejandro
Dubrovsky |
Aussie
author of Small Potato |
| Helpful
folk: |
|
| Peter McKenzie | Author
of
Lambchop and Warp (frequent NZ winner of the Aussie championship) |
| Tony Werten | Author
of Xinix |
| John Stanback | Author
of
GnuChess and others... |
| Dann Corbit | A long-time Winboard/CC stalwart |
| Dan Homan | Author
of Exchess |
| Tord Romstad | Author of Gothmog and Glaurung |
| Fabien Letouzey | Author of the phenomenal Fruit |
| Forums: |
|
| Volker
Pittlik |
hosts
and maintains the Winboard
Forum |
| CCC |
the Computer
Chess Club |
A
little
background... we
are from Wollongong, Australia. 
TRACE is an acronym for Tracey & Ross' Australian Chess Engine.... Tracey is my wife, it was her encouragement that made this possible.
I have been passionate about computer chess since 1983. It was the desire to write a chess program which drove me into computer programming as a career. My first engines barely played chess at all... in fact, the first (written in GFABasic on an Atari ST) chose moves randomly from the list of legal moves. It took a while to write anything that resembled chess. TRACE is my first publicly available competitive engine.
To email me: john.boyd AT optusnet.com.au
I look forward to hearing from you. Cheers!
