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XQWLight stands for XiangQi Wizzard Light. This is part of the open-source project Xiangqi Wizzard, aimed at hand-helds and similar small machines. The Xiangqi Wizzard project encompasses state-of-the-art and light GUIs and accompanying AI. XQWLight is written by Huang Chen (a.k.a. Morning Yellow), which makes it the little brother of Morning Yellow's major engine, Elephant Eye.
The XQWLight AI was isolated from its GUI for the purpose of including it as an AI plugin for the HOXChess project. (HOXChess is a another Xiangqi GUI, primarily intended as ICS client.) This made it very easy for me to fuse it to a generic WinBoard driver, similarto what I use in al my other (Chess variant) engines. This way I create a native WinBoard version of XQWLight 6.0.
XQWLight is a very clearly written engine, intended to be an educational example for a Chinese-Chess engine. It has a good search routine, and a simple evaluation based purely on Piece-Square tables. The latter seem very well optimized; XQWLight plays a very "intuitive" game of Xiangqi, instictively gravitating the piece to where they have the largest probability to initiate decsive tactics.
XQWLight 0.6 has the following features:
* 16x16 Mailbox board
* PVS search
* Hash table with depth-preferred replacement
* Null-move pruning
* Check extension
* Repetition detection with Perptual-Check scoring
* Quiescence Search with MVV/LVA sorting
* Killer heuristic
* History heuristic (used for sorting in full-width search)
* Piece-Square tables for evaluation
* Elaborate opening book
At the time I converted it, XQWLight was the strongest native WinBoard XQ engine. Since then it has been superseeded by HaQiKi D in this respect. Compared to engines with a more elaborate evaluation, such as most UCCI engines, XQWLight cannot really compete, as is shown from the ranking on the UCCI engine page.
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