morlock

Morlock is a hobbyist chess engine in Go. It supports a few standard techniques and protocols and is currently mainly used to re-implement the following historical chess engines:

TUROCHAMP (1948) by Alan Turing and David Champernowne

Turochamp is an implementation of Turing's original "paper" chess engine. Turochamp uses a full search with an unbounded quiescence search of "considerable moves" using material ratio and position play heuristics:

• turochamp-1ply. Rating ~1300 (blitz/rapid).
• turochamp-2ply. Rating ~1400 (blitz/rapid).

BERNSTEIN (1957) by Alex Bernstein, Michael de V. Roberts, Timothy Arbuckle and Martin Belsky

Bernstein is a re-implementation of the first complete chess engine: Bernstein's chess program on the IBM 704. Bernstein uses a selective search limited to 7 "plausible moves" for computational feasibility:

• bernstein-2ply. Rating ~1200 (blitz/rapid).
• bernstein-4ply. Rating ~1400 (blitz/rapid).

SARGON (1978) by Dan and Kathe Spracklen

Sargon is a re-implementation of Spracklens' early commercial chess engine. Sargon uses a full search with material exchange, king/queen pins and board control heuristics:

• sargon-1ply. Rating ~1300 (blitz/rapid).
• sargon-2ply. Rating ~1400 (blitz/rapid).
• sargon-3ply. Rating ~1500 (blitz/rapid).
• sargon-4ply. Rating ~1600 (blitz/rapid).

Each engine can be played 24/7 for free on lichess.org. They have quirks, blind spots and limitations, which is part of their charm -- and play at low search depths to entertain rather than win.

December 2023