Engine: Hannibal 1.2
Authors: Samuel N. Hamilton and Edsel G. Apostol
E-mail: snhamilton@yahoo.com, ed_apostol@yahoo.com
Home Page: http://sites.google.com/site/edapostol/hannibal
Release Date: April 30 2012
First version release: July 17 2010


This is free software. There is no warranty of any kind. Use at your own risk.


Information:

Hannibal is a collaborative work between Sam Hamilton (author of LearningLemming) and Edsel Apostol (author of TwistedLogic).  It borrows heavily from Edsel's TwistedLogic chess engine, with a more selective search and significantly improved endgame play.  No GUI is provided, Hannibal is meant to be played using a GUI such as Arena (http://www.playwitharena.com/) that supports UCI chess engines.  If there are bugs you would like to report, or features you would like added, feel free to email either of us using the contact information provided above.

UCI options:
Hash (1-4096) - hash table size in MB
Pawn Hash (1-128) - pawn hash table size in MB
Ponder (true/false) - whether or not engine thinks on opponent's time
OwnBook (true/false) - whether the engine uses a book
Book File(string) - name of the book file
BookMove Limit(1-256) - maximum number of moves played from book
Time Buffer(0-10000) - time in milliseconds reserved by engine for GUI related overhead
Contempt(-100 - 100) - how much better or worse opponent is expected to be (negative value indicates Hannibal believes it is worse at chess than opponent, positive indicates it is better)

Todo:

Support SMP
Additional Endgame Knowledge
Automated Opening Learning
Overall Engine Strength Enhancement

Acknowledgement:

Big thanks to these people, this engine wouldn't be this strong without them:
Audy Arandela (USA) - for the valuable tests, for the very strong opening book used in tournaments, for being an operator for online tournaments, for running the engine in online tournaments and in ICC

Thanks to Gerd Isenberg for the ideas on sliding move generation.
Thanks to Tord Romstad and Stuart Cracraft for invaluable comments on the source code of Twisted Logic from which Hannibal clearly benefits.
Thanks to Tord/Marco/Joona for Stockfish where we borrowed/stolen a lot of ideas especially in the move generation.
Thanks to the author of Fruit, Fabien Letouzey, for providing the source code of his program, as we both learned a lot from it.
Thanks to the author of Olithink, Dr. Olivier Brausch, for the bitboard move generation stuff.
Thanks to the author of Buzz OS, Pradu Kannan, for the ideas on pawn structure evaluation. 
Thanks to Michel Vandenbergh for the polyglot book specification and code.
Thanks to Michael Sherwin for sharing his ideas, wit, and source code.
Thanks to all the people on CCC, Winboard, WBEC forums, etc. We have learned a lot from their posts. 
Thanks to all the programmers who shared their source code (anonymously or otherwise) without which Hannibal would clearly be a weaker program. 
Thanks also to all the people who runs various tournament and rating lists that includes our program (CEGT, CCRL, UEL, OW, CW, WBEC, ChessWar, etc.)
Special thanks to David Dahlem for the logo.
And lastly, thanks to those that we forgot to mention.

Changes:

1.0
-first release

1.0a
-fixed a bug in the opening book implementation

1.1
-rewrote most of the search
-eval parameter tuning

1.2
-search improvements
-eval improvements
