Xiexiemaster, or simply Xiexie, is a strong xiangqi (Chinese chess) program created by Pascal Tang in 1998. At the beginning, as the program was located in France, it was difficult to find high-class Chinese chess players. Finally, some European top players accepted to challenge the software (Hua Say Ty, Woo Wei Cheung, and Dang Thanh Trung). The author was so grateful that he called the program "Xiexie", which comes from the pinyin of the Chinese word 谢谢, which means "thank you". Eugenio Castillo joined the Xiexie development team in 1999. Before 2001, there were a few Chinese chess programs and they were fairly mediocre. The program Xiexie became famous by beating the Chinese delegation of Chinese chess international Masters and Grand Masters in 2001 (e.g., Lu Qin and Jin Hai Ying), who came for a show in Paris. This victory marked the beginning of the recognition of Chinese chess software by top players.
Since then, the evaluation function has been further improved by Pascal Tang. In 2005, Jih-tung Pai added support for a DTC (Distance To Conversion) endgame tablebase. Jih-tung Pai expanded Xiexie to have the largest Chinese chess endgame tablebase in the world (350 GB).
Rewards
Xiexiemaster won tournaments on the internet (on the site www.clubxianqi.com, for example, with pseudo-Patang or www.movesky.net) between 2000 and 2005).
Xiexiemaster was multiple-time medalist at the Computer Olympiads (Silver medal in 2016).
Xiexiemaster finally won the World Championship of Computer Chinese chess in 2004 in Tainan (Taipei). Xiexie is currently still a reference in the programming world of Chinese chess.