CookieCat is my little open source Pascal chess program. It was named after the real Cookie Cat:
She'll be ten years old in April.
Inside the CookieCat program, there are three groups of routines named after some of my feline companions, past and present. There are the Lucky positional evaluator routines, the Smokey mate finder routines, and the Spooky general search routines. The names were chosen not so much to be cute, but rather to make it easier for others to identify the program's functional organization.
I am a cat person in a major way. In fact as I type this I have one in my lap (we have two at home). And recently I have been volunteering at the local animal shelter where I socialize cats (i.e., give the ones in the shelter a little human interaction and play time, so they're not in cages 24/7). That's my other hobby, besides computer chess!
I've got four of the little charmers at present. Cookie moved in when she was only four months old, Lucky (ca. 8 yo) and Spooky (ca. 6 yo) are shelter boys, and Peaches (15 yo) is a foster girl I adopted. Smokey was also a shelter boy; he passed back in 2008 at the age of 16 or so.
When Cookie was just a kitten, she demonstrated her displeasure with my spending too much time programming by destroying two keyboards with cat piss. With Spooky, I cannot set up a chess position on a real board without him jumping up and scattering the pieces about the room. The others are too fat and lazy to do much damage.
Cookie got her name because with her color pattern, she looked like a survivor of an Oreo cookie factory explosion.
Due to their history of surviving in the wild, my shelter cats are excellent mousers, and that's good because of the abundance of field mice who attempt entry into my modest home. For any mouse who makes it inside, one of the shelter cats will perform a smart search and deliver an unstoppble mate in five (minutes).
