Shane's Chess Information Database (Scid) is a popular free UNIX, Windows, Linux, and Mac application for viewing and maintaining huge databases of chess games. It is written in TCL/TK and C++.
Scid has undergone several stages of development. Firstly by Shane Hudson, and then Pascal Georges.
Scid supports
portable game notation and its own database format. It can interface with
Winboard engines (such as
Crafty and
GNU Chess), and UCI engines (such as Fruit, Rybka, Stockfish and Shredder) to perform position analysis or play computer-human games. Scid can be used as a graphical interface to connect to and play games on the Free Internet Chess Server, FICS. It can use up to five piece endgame tablebases, includes a move tree with statistics, and display photographs and information of players in the database.
Scid can classify games using the
standard ECO code, as well as its own extensions to the ECO system. One can search for specific endings, such as pawn vs. rook or rook vs. queen. Scid's search allows filtering by player, color, year, result, and ECO code.
Shane's Chess Information Database (Scid) is a popular free UNIX, Windows, Linux, and Mac application for viewing and maintaining huge databases of chess games. It is written in TCL/TK and C++.
Scid has undergone several stages of development. Firstly by Shane Hudson, and then Pascal Georges. Active development is mostly with the fork - Scid vs. PC.
Shane Hudson is the original author of Scid. He worked on it from 1999 to 2003 and the program is named after him (Shane's Chess Information Database).
A lot of code he wrote are still in use (especially c code) and if you are curious or nostalgic have a look at his last readme.
The people who helped him are thanked here.
Shane's code focused on speed and most notably implemented two very clever ideas:
•store chess moves using only one byte. Representing 64 squares requires 6-bits(2^6 = 64), so in order to store a move (from square to square) you need 6+6=12-bits. Add a least 1-bit for promotions and you are at 13-bits. Chess players usually like puzzles: i let you the fun of discovering how to store chess moves using only 8-bits.
•when searching games for a specific position, search instead for the games that did not reached that position. This apparently strange idea is the reason why Scid's tree search is so fast.
Modern computers have now a lot of memory and speed, so saving bits is a little out of fashion (and there are obviously some drawbacks: the 1-byte format makes chess960 and illegal moves difficult to store, and the tree search do not go into variations), but many other projects was created from his codebase and nowadays, PGN format apart, scid is the most known free (GPL) chess database format.
Pascal Georges
Pascal Georges worked on Scid from December 2006 to January 2010. He added many features:
•Interface for UCI chess engines
•Docking mode
•FICS
•Training features
•support for Novag Citrine
He also ported Scid to Pocket PC.
The Scid Project
TODO:
Franz Nagl added new spelling and rating files on April 2007
Alexander Wagner June 2008 (scid-3.6.24)
Shane's Chess Information Database (Scid) is a popular free UNIX, Windows, Linux, and Mac application for viewing and maintaining huge databases of chess games. It is written in TCL/TK and C++.
Scid has undergone several stages of development. Firstly by Shane Hudson, and then Pascal Georges.
Scid supports portable game notation and its own database format. It can interface with Winboard engines (such as Crafty and GNU Chess), and UCI engines (such as Fruit, Rybka, Stockfish and Shredder) to perform position analysis or play computer-human games. Scid can be used as a graphical interface to connect to and play games on the Free Internet Chess Server, FICS. It can use up to five piece endgame tablebases, includes a move tree with statistics, and display photographs and information of players in the database.
Scid can classify games using the standard ECO code, as well as its own extensions to the ECO system. One can search for specific endings, such as pawn vs. rook or rook vs. queen. Scid's search allows filtering by player, color, year, result, and ECO code.
Shane's Chess Information Database (Scid) is a popular free UNIX, Windows, Linux, and Mac application for viewing and maintaining huge databases of chess games. It is written in TCL/TK and C++.
Scid has undergone several stages of development. Firstly by Shane Hudson, and then Pascal Georges. Active development is mostly with the fork - Scid vs. PC.
Shane Hudson is the original author of Scid. He worked on it from 1999 to 2003 and the program is named after him (Shane's Chess Information Database).
A lot of code he wrote are still in use (especially c code) and if you are curious or nostalgic have a look at his last readme.
The people who helped him are thanked here.
Shane's code focused on speed and most notably implemented two very clever ideas:
•store chess moves using only one byte. Representing 64 squares requires 6-bits(2^6 = 64), so in order to store a move (from square to square) you need 6+6=12-bits. Add a least 1-bit for promotions and you are at 13-bits. Chess players usually like puzzles: i let you the fun of discovering how to store chess moves using only 8-bits.
•when searching games for a specific position, search instead for the games that did not reached that position. This apparently strange idea is the reason why Scid's tree search is so fast.
Modern computers have now a lot of memory and speed, so saving bits is a little out of fashion (and there are obviously some drawbacks: the 1-byte format makes chess960 and illegal moves difficult to store, and the tree search do not go into variations), but many other projects was created from his codebase and nowadays, PGN format apart, scid is the most known free (GPL) chess database format.
Pascal Georges
Pascal Georges worked on Scid from December 2006 to January 2010. He added many features:
•Interface for UCI chess engines
•Docking mode
•FICS
•Training features
•support for Novag Citrine
He also ported Scid to Pocket PC.
The Scid Project
TODO:
Franz Nagl added new spelling and rating files on April 2007
Alexander Wagner June 2008 (scid-3.6.24)
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