The Turk

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The Turk,
an experimental chess program developed in the mid 90s by two students of the University of Alberta and members of the Games research group, Yngvi Björnsson and Andreas Junghanns, which competed the WMCCC 1996 in Jakarta. It uses NegaScout and also includes most search enhancement found in contemporary chess programs, such as extensions, quiescence search, and transposition table. Move ordering considers captures in MVV-LVA order, and the history heuristic is used to sort the remaining moves. The best move previously found in a position is stored in the transposition table and searched first where applicable. The Turk was test-bed of various pruning techniques such as Uncertainty Cut-Offs ¹ and Multi-Cut ² .

Namesake

• The Turk by Yakup İpek

See also

• Kempelen
• Mr. Turk
• Multi-Cut
• Raspberry Turk
• The Baron
• Uncertainty Cut-Offs
• WMCCC 1996

Publications

• Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland, Jonathan Schaeffer, Andreas Junghanns (1997). Searching with Uncertainty Cut-offs. ICCA Journal, Vol. 20, No. 1
• Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland, Jonathan Schaeffer, Andreas Junghanns (1997). Searching with Uncertainty Cut-offs. Advances in Computer Chess 8
• Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (1998). Multi-cut Pruning in Alpha-Beta Search. CG 1998
• Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (2001). Multi-cut Alpha-Beta Pruning in Game Tree Search. Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. 252, pdf

Forum Posts

• Re: Computerised Chess Games by Valavan Manohararajah, rgcc, April 07, 1997

External Links

Chess Engine

• The Turk's ICGA Tournaments

Misc

• The Turk from Wikipedia, the historic fake chess-playing machine
• Ein Türke in Paderborn by Mathias Feist and Karsten Bauermeister, ChessBase Nachrichten, April 06, 2004 (German)

References