Steven Edwards

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Steven James Edwards, (February 7, 1957 - October 1, 2016 ¹)
was an American computer scientist, BS and MS in Mathematics, and computer chess programmer. Steven Edwards coordinated and specified the PGN- and EPD-standards and the FEN-Position Description ². In 1994 he introduced a distance to mate endgame tablebase format, called the Edwards' Tablebases. He is author of multiple chess programs and toolkits, Spector, Symbolic, the Chess in Lisp (CIL) package ^{3 4}, a portable ChessLisp interpreter ⁵, and the Chess for Arduino Mega Myopic ⁶ and the Chess in Pascal CookieCat ⁷ projects ⁸. Steven Edwards has been actively involved in Perft computations, where he computed and verified perft of the initial position up to a depth of 13, now available in the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences ⁹ .

Steven Edwards died on October 1, 2016 at age 59 at his home in Raymond, New Hampshire, only a few weeks after his father James Edwards passed away ¹⁰, who introduced him to chess ¹¹.

Selected Publications

¹²

• Steven Edwards (1995). Automated Communication for Computer Chess Events. Computer Chess Reports Vol. 5 No. 3+4 pp. 22
• Steven Edwards (1995). ICCA Rules. Computer Chess Reports Vol. 5 No. 3+4, pp. 22
• Steven Edwards and the Editorial Board (1995). An Examination of the Endgame KBNKN. ICCA Journal, Vol. 18, No. 3, pdf
• Steven Edwards (1995). Comments on Barth’s Article “Combining Knowledge and Search to Yield Infallible Endgame Programs.” ICCA Journal, Vol. 18, No. 4 ¹³
• Steven Edwards (1996). An Examination of the Endgame KBBKN. ICCA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1

Forum Posts

1990 ...

• gnuchess.book in Lisp by Steven Edwards, gnu.chess, January 23, 1990 » Opening Book
• 24th ACM Computer Chess Championship by Steven J. Edwards, rgc, June 25, 1994 » ACM 1994

ACM 1994: Spector's games by Steven J. Edwards, rgc, June 29, 1994 » Spector

• Announcing forced mates: a poll by Steven J. Edwards, rgc, July 21, 1994 » Edwards' Tablebases
• KBBK tablebases: attempt #2 by Steven J. Edwards, rgc, August 13, 1994
• Updated tablebase documentation by Steven J. Edwards, rgc, October 14, 1994
• KPK tablebases now available via ftp by Steven J. Edwards, rgc, October 14, 1994

1995 ...

• Re: FICS vs. ICS: No, really, which is better? by Steven J. Edwards, alt.chess.ics, June 01, 1995
• The B* Algorithm by Steven Edwards, rgc, June 06, 1995 » B*
• Re: Speed of Move Generator by Steven Edwards, rgcc, August 16, 1995 » Perft, Spector
• ICCAJ v.19 n.2 now in North America by Steven Edwards, rgcc, July 03, 1996 » ICCA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2
• KRBKB and ACM USCCC #6 by Steven J. Edwards, rgcc, September 29, 1996 » ACM 1975, Treefrog, David Levy
• EPD examples: Bratko-Kopec test suite by Steven J. Edwards, CCC, June 15, 1998 » Extended Position Description, Bratko-Kopec Test

2000 ...

• PGN upddate and revisions by Steven Edwards, rgcc, May 21, 2002 » Portable Game Notation
• Paradise performance by Steven Edwards, CCC, August 22, 2003 » Paradise
• Comparison: Paradise and Symbolic by Steven Edwards, CCC, February 13, 2004 » Paradise, Symbolic
• On naming one's chess program by Steven Edwards, CCC, March 27, 2004

2005 ...

• Fruit fly races by Steven Edwards, CCC, April 06, 2005 » Artificial Intelligence
• Re: Cloned Chess Engines by Steven Edwards, CCC, May 05, 2005 » Clones
• POSIX threads by Steven Edwards, CCC, July 05, 2005 » Thread
• For chess program source collectors by Steven Edwards, Chess Circle, August 13, 2006
• Retrocomputing with the 6502 by Steven Edwards, CCC, June 22, 2007 » 6502

2008

• Incremental updating for positional evaluation by Steven Edwards, CCC, March 27, 2008 » Incremental Updates
• Working notes: A similarity facility by Steven Edwards, CCC, May 02, 2008
• How common is Common Lisp? by Steven Edwards, CCC, August 2, 2008
• A decade from now ... by Steven Edwards, CCC, August 14, 2008
• CIL Toolkit: code snippets: move generation by Steven Edwards, CCC, August 19, 2008
• Could this program be written? by Steven Edwards, CCC, August 24, 2008 » Retrograde Analysis
• Lisp quotes by Steven Edwards, CCC, September 04, 2008

2009

• Interlock clusters by Steven Edwards, CCC, January 25, 2009
• Hyperthreading Hype predates Intel by Steven Edwards, CCC, February 07, 2009
• Multithreaded movepath enumeration (perft) by Steven Edwards, CCC, February 27, 2009 » Perft
• Move generation: staged vs all-at-once by Steven Edwards, CCC, April 30, 2009 » Move Generation
• Pondering? Yes. Ponder move? Maybe not by Steven Edwards, CCC, July 30, 2009 » Pondering

2010 ...

• Myopic, a new Creative Commons chess program by Steven Edwards, CCC, May 22, 2010
• ChessLisp for everyone!, CCC, July 22, 2010

2011

• Unicode values for chessmen by Steven Edwards, CCC, March 07, 2011 » Game Notation
• A brief history of the popcnt instruction by Steven Edwards, CCC, March 22, 2011 » Population Count
• The LBR move ordering heuristic by Steven Edwards, CCC, March 26, 2011 » Last Best Reply
• Testing LBR by Steven Edwards, CCC, March 27, 2011
• An alternative means of PV recovery by Steven Edwards, CCC, April 17, 2011 » Principal Variation
• Perft(12) count confirmed by Steven Edwards, CCC, April 25, 2011 » Perft
• Some spinlock code, just for you by Steven Edwards, CCC, June 01, 2011 » Parallel Search
• Spinlocks galore by Steven Edwards, CCC, June 02, 2011
• One billion random games by Steven Edwards, CCC, August 27, 2011
• Announcement: The Bozochess Project by Steven Edwards, CCC, October 05, 2011 » Pascal
• Perft(3) from 1978, with a twist! by Steven Edwards, CCC, December 08, 2011 ¹⁴
• Number sequence puzzle by Steven Edwards, CCC, December 16, 2011 » Endgame Tablebases ¹⁵
• CookieCat Monday release schedule by Steven Edwards, CCC, December 19, 2011 » CookieCat
• Tablebase class name list available by Steven Edwards, CCC, December 19, 2011 » Endgame Tablebases
• The Raspberry Pi Thread by Steven Edwards, CCC, December 24, 2011 » Raspberry Pi

2012

• One hundred years ago, the first chess computer by Steven Edwards, CCC, January 05, 2012 » El Ajedrecista
• CookieCat's opening book implementation by Steven Edwards, CCC, January 05, 2012 » CookieCat, Opening Book
• CookieCat source via the net by Steven Edwards, CCC, January 26, 2012
• Computing from the Old Days, brought back to life by Steven Edwards, CCC, August 16, 2012 » 8080
• CookieCat and perft by Steven Edwards, CCC, October 14, 2012

2013

• For a limited time, two sources by Steven Edwards, CCC, January 22, 2013
• Yet another time allocation heuristic by Steven Edwards, CCC, February 17, 2013 » Time Management
• Perft(14) estimates thread by Steven Edwards, CCC, February 26, 2013
• Perft(15) estimates thread by Steven Edwards, CCC, April 10, 2013
• An idea for move ordering at the root by Steven Edwards, CCC, June 09, 2013 » Move Ordering, Root
• DGT e-Board by Steven Edwards, CCC, June 09, 2013
• A perft() benchmark by Steven Edwards, CCC, June 26, 2013
• One billion random games by Steven Edwards, CCC, July 03, 2013
• Resurrecting the Super Constellation by Steven Edwards, CCC, July 07, 2013 » Super Constellation
• Standard candles by Steven Edwards, CCC, August 27, 2013
• DGT board C++ interface project by Steven Edwards, Hiarcs Forum, December 07, 2013 » DGT Board
• Atari 2600 Video Chess by Steven Edwards, Hiarcs Forum, December 29, 2013 » Video Chess

2014

• New robotic arm offering by Steven Edwards, Hiarcs Forum, January 23, 2014 » Robots
• Perft(14) revisited by Steven Edwards, CCC, August 08, 2014
• Non recursive perft() by Steven Edwards, CCC, August 24, 2014 » Iterative Search
• OpenCL perft() Technical Issues by Steven Edwards, CCC, August 26, 2014 » OpenCL
• Escape from the Unix Cosmic Background Radiation by Steven Edwards, CCC, September 23, 2014
• The upcoming Y2038 catastrophe by Steven Edwards, CCC, September 25, 2014 » Mac OS

2015 ...

• Perft(14) Weekly Status Reports for 2015 by Steven Edwards, CCC, January 04, 2015 » Perft, Perft Results
• Thread count limits and core counts by Steven Edwards, CCC, March 22, 2015
• Pi64: Raspberry Pi 2B 64 element bramble by Steven Edwards, CCC, April 05, 2015 » Raspberry Pi 2
• Thread synchronization questions for experts by Steven Edwards, CCC, April 21, 2015 » Symbolic, Thread
• Polling standard input from C++ by Steven Edwards, CCC, May 10, 2015
• A Nice routine by Steven Edwards, CCC, May 12, 2015
• Revised source for the random game generator by Steven Edwards, CCC, May 12, 2015
• Pre-announcement: Oscar Chess Library by Steven Edwards, CCC, September 01, 2015
• Perft(14) Weekly Status Reports for 2016 by Steven Edwards, CCC, December 29, 2015 » Perft, Perft Results

2016

• Relay based chess computing by Steven Edwards, CCC, May 03, 2016 » Electro-Mechanical
• Just a moment of your time, please by Steven Edwards, CCC, August 16, 2016
• Two perft(7) mismatches from work unit 571 by Steven Edwards, CCC, September 04, 2016
• Steven Edwards RIP... by Steve Maughan, CCC, November 10, 2016

Downloads

¹⁶

• tbgen.zip

• Spector.zip

• ChessInLisp.tar

• myopic.tar

• CookieCat.tar

External Links

• A Computer Chess Analysis Interchange Format by Dick Lipton and Ken Regan, Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP, January 20, 2015

References