Paladin - Chess Programming Wiki

Home * Engines * Paladin

Charlemagne and his Paladin 1 Charlemagne and his Paladin ¹

Paladin,
an experimental UCI compliant open source chess engine by Ankan Banerjee, written in C++. Paladin is intended as testbed for various bitboard techniques concerning space-time tradeoff, more or less suited for various architectures, such as GPU friendly Kogge-Stone algorithms versus fancy or even plain magic bitboards to determine sliding piece attacks. Paladin features a set of compile time switches to control the search, to use intrinsics for population count and bitscan, and as mentioned, to determine computation versus lookup techniques ¹. While not officially released nor announced, the testing community exploited the publicly available sources from GitHub providing its author with a fait accompli ².

Contents

Description

Paladin's board is represented by a dense hexa bitboard suited for a copy-make approach, that is six bitboards for white pieces, pawns, knights, diagonal and orthogonal sliding pieces, and kings. The base ranks of the pawn bitboard are even used to encode game state data such as castling rights, en passant target square and halfmove clock ³.