Made by an independent developer
One person, a long love of chess, and the idea that good software can be given away.
Who makes The Baronet
The Baronet is written by David Thoiron, developer of FotoSketcher, the long-running freeware program that turns photos into drawings and paintings. The idea is the same: polished software, freely available to everyone, made to be used rather than to collect data.
Every part of The Baronet - the computer opponent, the neural network, the lessons, the game review, the boards and the piece sets - was built for it. There is no company, no investor and no team behind it; there is one developer, a chess board, and a great many test games.
Why “The Baronet”?
A baronet is a hereditary British title, ranking below a baron and above a knight: a title of some standing, worn without fuss. The crest carries the motto Ultima Necat, “the last one kills” - the Latin inscription found on old clock faces, where it means the last hour. On a chess board, it is simply the last move that counts.
Mark IV
The program you download is the fourth generation. The first versions evaluated positions with hand-written rules, as chess programs did for decades. Mark IV replaced them with a neural network trained for The Baronet, rewrote the program so that it runs natively on both Windows and macOS, and added the game review and the lessons. A mobile version is on its way.
How it is made
The Baronet is written in Embarcadero Delphi with the FireMonkey framework, which compiles to native code for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS from a single source. Its playing strength is tested the only way that works in chess - by playing: thousands of games decide whether a change is kept. The review has its own test suite of more than two thousand checks, including famous games such as Morphy's Opera Game, where 16.Qb8+ must be found Brilliant and no plain recapture may ever be.
Everything that goes into the program is either original or used under a licence that allows it: the neural network is trained on The Baronet's own games and on public-domain (CC0) positions, and the tablebase probing uses the open-source Fathom library.
Support The Baronet
The Baronet will stay free. Donations support the time that goes into it, and they are a very welcome sign that the work is useful to someone. Telling a friend or a chess club about it helps just as much.
♥ Donate via PayPalQuestions, bugs or ideas? Write to the author.