TalkChess.com

Hello together,

unfortunately Bruce Moreland cannot be contacted under his former email-address.

This engine from the year 1995 had its own GUI and was made for e.g. win32, but one thing seems to be a mystery:

Is it compatible to WinBoard (CECP)-protocol and -if yes- which command line parameters are required to run under Arena-GUI?

Any suggestions?

Best wishes,

Norbert

I'm not aware of any version of Ferret ever being released, commercially or otherwise.

As far as I can remember Bruce kept Ferret private.

Steve

Steve Maughan wrote:I'm not aware of any version of Ferret ever being released, commercially or otherwise.

As far as I can remember Bruce kept Ferret private.

Steve

Bruce Moreland also wrote a WB-compatible engine, Gerbil :

http://rwbc-chess.de/download.htm

Has anyone tried it?

CL

carldaman wrote:

Steve Maughan wrote:I'm not aware of any version of Ferret ever being released, commercially or otherwise.

As far as I can remember Bruce kept Ferret private.

Steve

Bruce Moreland also wrote a WB-compatible engine, Gerbil :

http://rwbc-chess.de/download.htm

Has anyone tried it?

CL

3 Gerbil versions (max rating 2091) are here : http://home.scarlet.be/vincentlejeune/r ... 131001.txt

I thought Ferret was privateware and not released.

I am pretty sure it was Winboard compatible. It was one of the earliest programs on ICC. I know nothing about the details of running it though.

--Jon

More info about Ferret here : http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Ferret

Steve Maughan wrote:I'm not aware of any version of Ferret ever being released, commercially or otherwise.

As far as I can remember Bruce kept Ferret private.

Steve

Back in 2000-2001, I worked for Convekta and closed a deal with Bruce to produce its first chess-playing program with a new GUI I designed. It was quite the coup, since ChessBase had already made him an offer and had been turned down. At the time CB had a tight grip on all the best engines, and he had no desire to become just one of the crowd. The promise of a new and exclusive interface was the clincher.

We moved forward, and several flavors of Ferret were tested in the team. Sadly, the project never came to fruition though I still have our test GUI and Ferret. Needless to say it is still his to decide what to do with it, if anything.

For reference it was somewhere between Fritz 5 and 6 in strength. Fritz 6 was the king of the hill at the time.

Uri may remember as I brought him in as one of the testers.

Albert Silver wrote:

Steve Maughan wrote:I'm not aware of any version of Ferret ever being released, commercially or otherwise.

As far as I can remember Bruce kept Ferret private.

Steve

Back in 2000-2001, I worked for Convekta and closed a deal with Bruce to produce its first chess-playing program with a new GUI I designed. It was quite the coup, since ChessBase had already made him an offer and had been turned down. At the time CB had a tight grip on all the best engines, and he had no desire to become just one of the crowd. The promise of a new and exclusive interface was the clincher.

We moved forward, and several flavors of Ferret were tested in the team. Sadly, the project never came to fruition though I still have our test GUI and Ferret. Needless to say it is still his to decide what to do with it, if anything.

For reference it was somewhere between Fritz 5 and 6 in strength. Fritz 6 was the king of the hill at the time.

Uri may remember as I brought him in as one of the testers.

Not much good has ever come by keeping engines private for eternity...

jdart wrote:
1.- thought Ferret was privateware and not released.

2.-I am pretty sure it was Winboard compatible. It was one of the earliest programs on ICC. I know nothing about the details of running it though.

--Jon

Hello !

1.- Theoretically, yes. But they are some versions floating around. The axiom "friend of a friend" works even in privateware world.

2.- The 1.00 (258) version it is a WB-1 compatible chess engine. Any doubt. Just missing a command-line argument to work in Winboard/Arena GUIs.

A terrible strong chess program for the 1995 year. They are many private chess engines, but Ferret is a computer chess jewellry.

Regards,
SilvianR

Sylwy wrote:1.- Theoretically, yes. But they are some versions floating around. The axiom "friend of a friend" works even in privateware world.

Even though Bruce Moreland is no longer around in computer chess circles, I would hope that out of respect for him that these "floating around" versions don't make it into the mainstream. If he wanted to release Ferret to the general public, he would have released it.

I remember reading some old Winboard forum posts about a chess engiine that wasn't released to the public, I forget the engine's name, and some beta testers had let it out into the wild. If I remember correctly the engine's programmer was young, maybe even just a teenager, and the release of the engine against his wishes turned him off to continuing.