The Baron is Winboard Chess engine that I have developed in my spare time.

The development of Baron started in August 2001. My intention is to make it a knowledge based engine rather than a fast searching engine. Main focus is endgame knowledge. This is a particular nice challenge as many chess engines are playing like beginners in that phase. The existence of endgame database did not really change that.

When releasing the Baron for the first time I had to think of an appropriate name. It became ‘The Baron’

The city of Breda is the centre of the Barony of Breda and that is reflected in the names of a lot of sports clubs, a school, hospital and losts of others. As I am member of the chess club The Barony, it seemed a logical choice to call my engine The Baron. This is the real origin of the name.

However, a seconds story exists. Shortly after releasing the Baron, I googled a bit with keywords like ‘Baron’ and ‘Chess’, and found out that the first Chess ‘Computer’, The Turk,  was built by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen to amuse Empress Maria Theresia of Austria. Since then I consider the Baron to be named after him as well.

The Baron uses most modern chess programming mechanisms. It has an opening book, is able to learn form its mistakes with position learning and is able to use the Nalimov six-pieces endgame tablebases. The search is pretty much brute force, except for null-move pruning. I never got the various other pruning mechanisms to work for me so the search depth of the Baron is a bit limited.

There is also a version of the Baron that is capable of playing Chess960 (Fischer Random Chess).

Current strength is difficult to estimate. Although it is not the strongest engines that is available, the playing strength is sufficient to win a fair share of games against any opponent. However, there are several competitions where the Baron participates. References to these online tournaments can be found on the Links page