Phalanx is an old, popular chess engine, with an interesting history.
The latest code can be obtained from subversion with
source phalanx-XXIII-beta.tgz
windows phalanx-XXIII-win32-beta.tgz
Jim Ablett's windows/android/linux binaries phalanx-xxiii-ja.zip
Unfortunately both windows versions above have minor bugs. Jim Ablett's version should be used for tournament matches. phalanx-XXIII-win32-beta should be used for Scid's analysis window.
Currently win32 polling now works, but has a bug. It does not get updated when making a move in Scid. The issue is with the io.c::interrupt proc. This proc is getting called in Linux, but not in WIN32. Perhaps this is relevant http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard/engine-intf.html#7
This is the old web page, by Phalanx Reborn's author - José de Paula.
Welcome to the new Phalanx Chess home
This is the website for the Phalanx chess engine. It was created by a young Czech student, Dusan Dobes, but he vanished from the Internet around the year 2000. Luckily, he released Phalanx under the GPL license, so his work won't be forgotten; on the contrary, I hope that the community will help improve it and make it a worthy opponent to other chess engines.
Phalanx's playing style is quite human-like; when it plays at full strength, it may be compared to a intermediate-to-strong club player; beginners will be right at home with it, too.
I made some very little changes on Dobes's latest version of Phalanx so it could compile and run on any modern GNU/Linux system. The GCC compiler is required, as it uses some of its extensions. I plan to change that.
You can download, report bugs, and discuss Phalanx on the Project page, or make any requests to me directly, espinafre at users dot sourceforge dot net.
News
2006-02-15 22:13 GMT -3:00 Windows version has a problem with Arena: phalanx seems to hang after the book moves. Currently known workaround is to pass the option '-o -' to Phalanx's command line. Thanks to Dario Zucco for reporting this!
Quotes
PhalanxXXII was the most interesting of the seven engines (in my opinion). I was looking forward to a wild sacrificial game against it (based on the engine's description at the ChessBase GmbH site), but Phalanx fooled me. I played a couple of games against it immediately after replaying a couple of Steinitz' games from Reti's book Masters of the Chessboard. Steinitz was the master of the pawn push. He often drove his pawns relentlessly forward to deny space to his opponent. To my surprise (I might even say "shock"), Phalanx does the same thing. Control of space is evidently given high priority in its evaluation algorithm. As I played against Phalanx, it seemed intent on throttling me ("python-like", to use the hoary old stereotype). I give this program high marks for positional play -- the pawn pushes it made were all strong ones, and it never gave my Knights a chance to exploit any holes it may have created. Despite the relatively low rating range in "Handicap and fun" mode (1150-1950), Phalanx was without question the most unique and interesting of the seven engines and I'm looking forward to my next game against it.
Definition: phalanx: Chess playing program. Phalanx is a simple chess playing program of conventional design. It is xboard compatible. The main aim is to write a slow thinker with a lot of chess specific knowledge. Current version plays risky, active chess and shows quite good tactical performance.
Phalanx was nearly wholely written by a Czech student, Dusan Dobes.
This Sourceforge project is maintained by
Stevenaaus.