Takodori's Entrance to Shogi World

A Shogiban for GNU shogi

I got to know the following page exists after reading a recent post to shogi-l.

A Shogiban for Gnushogi

If you are interested in developing shogi engine

You may be interested in reading the followings since both have shogi GUI to work with Chess Engine Communication protocol.

Winboard_F

Tagua Project

Computer was so weak in last century

Here is the link to an interesting video at Youtube. It's a video that a computer was checkmated only in 15 moves in an even game.

Only 15 moves

The name of the software is "Naito 9dan Shogi Hiden" released in 1985 for family computer.

A reviewer of "Shion no ou" played Hamshogi and found shogi hard.

I would like to introduce a blog which specializes in reviewing Anime programms and it mentions to each Episode of Shion no Ou below;

Star Crossed Anime Blog :: Shion no Ou

In the review of the Episode 8, the reviewer wrote he tried Hamshogi and found shogi is a harder game than it looked. Interesting!

Hamshogi is a webtop human-to-machine type computer shogi software which you do not need to download to play. I posted how to use Hamshogi in English to shogi-l this June. If you need it for the use of Hamushogi linked above, here is the link to my post.

Reijer's report on 17th World Computer Shogi CHampionships

The long report titled "The 17th CSA Computer Shogi Championships" written by Reijer is available to read. Bonanza's victory in 2006 seems to have impacted many shogi programmers and let them to implement "bitboards".

YSS won 17th World Computer Shogi Championship

According to Computer Shogi Association(Japanese site), YSS won the 17th WCSC(World computer shogi championship). The tournament was held from May 3 through 5 in Chiba prefecture.

1st and 2nd days are for preliminary tournament and 8 programs went into the final round-robin league on May 5. The standings are as followings.

1st place - YSS(6-1)
2nd place - Tanase Shogi(6-1)
3rd place - Gekisashi(5-2)
4th place - Bonanza(5-2)
5th place - Bingo Shogi(3-4)
6th place - TACOS(2-5)
7th place - K-Shogi(1-6)
8th place - Ryu no Tamago(0-7)

The difference of the levels of top four programs is really razor-thin.

Watanabe beat Bonanza, though Bonanza led the middlegame.

On March 21, the young title holder, Ryuoh Watanabe matched with Bonanza, 16th World Computer Shogi Champion in Tokyo Japan. Both did not give any handicap. Watanabe won the game in 112 moves. To our surprise, Bonanza slightly led the position in the middlegame but it turned around in the endgame. Watanabe's victory was expected by many people, but everyone was amazed how Bonanza played well and the prediction that computer will be able to beat Meijin in 2012 got more reality after the game.

You may replay this historical game here(Kifu for Java) or here(KiFLA).

And you can see lots of photoes in the blog specifically opened for this special match by Japan Shogi Association, although the texts are written in Japanese there.

The translation of entries in Watanabe's blog are availabe in shogi-l archives as below;

Re: Watanabe's comments

Re: Watanabe's comments (2)

Re: Watanabe's comments (3)

1st draft released:"The Universal Shogi Interface"

Tord Romstad, the author of open source chess engine called Glaurung released the 1st draft of The Universal Shogi Interface on January 24, 2007.

Here are the links to the communications related to the  in shogi-l(mailing list) up to the release for your reference.

Some thoughts on computer Shogi (by Tord Romstad, Jan 15, 2007 10:01 PST )
RE: Some thoughts on computer Shogi (by Adrian Petrescu, Jan 15, 2007 10:24 PST)
Re: Some thoughts on computer Shogi (by Jeff Rollason, Jan 15, 2007 12:25 PST)
Re: Some thoughts on computer Shogi (by Hans Secelle, Jan 16, 2007 00:30 PST)
Re: Some thoughts on computer Shogi (by Tord Romstad, Jan 16, 2007 03:03 PST )
Re: Some thoughts on computer Shogi (by Tord Romstad, Jan 16, 2007 03:05 PST )
Re: Some thoughts on computer Shogi (by Tord Romstad, Jan 16, 2007 05:33 PST)
Re: Some thoughts on computer Shogi (by Jeff Rollason, Jan 17, 2007 00:18 PST )
RE: Some thoughts on computer Shogi (by Mark Schreibery Jan 18, 2007 08:18 PST)
Re: Some thoughts on computer Shogi (by Tord Romstad, Jan 18, 2007 10:55 PST)
Re: Some thoughts on computer Shogi (by Tord Romstad, Jan 18, 2007 11:34 PST)
Re: Some thoughts on computer Shogi (by Manabu Terao, Jan 19, 2007 08:38 PST )
Re: Some thoughts on computer Shogi (by Tord Romstad, Jan 19, 2007 12:43 PST )
Re: Some thoughts on computer Shogi (by David J Bush, Jan 19, 2007 13:34 PST )
Re: Some thoughts on computer Shogi (by Manabu Terao, Jan 19, 2007 14:18 PST )
Re: SOme thoughts on computer Shogi (by Tord Romstad, Jan 21, 2007 02:52 PST )
First draft of the Universal Shogi Interface(USI) (by Tord Romstad, Jan 24, 2007 12:22 PST )

And the below is the first response to the draft.

Re: First draft of the Universal Shogi Interface(USI) (by David J Bush, Jan 24, 2007 13:04 PST )

Registration deadline of 17th World Computer Shogi Championship is January 31

Computer Shogi Association unveiled the information about the registration of the 17th World Shogi Championship. The announcement can be found at this page.

Gene Davis Software

Today I found the website which may interest you if you are a computer shogi fan. It is Gene Davis Software. Gene Davis seems the name of the software developer. Right now, there are one commercial shogi program called Shogi for You and Me V1.2 and two free shogi programs such as Samurai Chess DEMO and Samurai Chess Lite(Applet) there.

You can play a shogi game as Sente(the first mover) with the computer on the Samurai Chess Lite(Applet) page. It offers you the choice of pieces in Traditional, Western, Davis, Davis(monochrome) styles.