Did Jonathan Schaeffer ever create a Chess Engine?

[Swaminathan]

Hello All,

Did Jonathan Schaeffer of Chinook fame ever attempted at creating a chess engine - be it an unreleased chess exe? Did he contribute stuff in programming?
I remember reading one of his article, It was very interesting. I'd like to know what he thought about anything related to computer chess or Go?

[BB+]

Yes he did. Phoenix. Also Prodigy and Planner, which were earlier versions/ideas.
He even had a conspiracy numbers version of Phoenix. http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve ... 0290900717
Most of his papers are probably at his website, but http://games.cs.ualberta.ca/~jonathan/publications.html is currently down.

[Rebel]

Met Jonathan in 1986 in Cologne playing against his brainchild Phoenix. Nice guy.

Ed

[Swaminathan]

Many thanks for your response guys.

[hyatt]

Hello All,

Did Jonathan Schaeffer of Chinook fame ever attempted at creating a chess engine - be it an unreleased chess exe? Did he contribute stuff in programming?
I remember reading one of his article, It was very interesting. I'd like to know what he thought about anything related to computer chess or Go?

Of course. Last one was called "Sun Phoenix" and ran on a cluster of sun workstations. He even experimented with the idea of two engines, one with full positional knowledge, one with no positional knowledge. The one without knowledge could search deeper and was used to make sure that the positional engine didn't fall into a deeper tactical trap. I don't recall when he stopped development, must have been in the 80's somewhere. Program was quite strong, however.