"Shotest was written starting 1996 and the current version in use is just a 
derivative of that original basic engine. This has been an additive process 
with essentially no code being removed. It will at some point be 
substantially re-written. The original engine derived ideas taken from my 
much older Merlin Chess program, in particular SUPER SOMA. All of the ideas 
in the engine; except universal generic ideas such as minimax, alpha-beta, 
killer heuristics and hash tables; are all of my own devising. There are no 
code fragments, or modified variants of, taken from any other program.

Shotest has always used a probability-based tree search, which shares some 
common ideas with Gekisashi, but pre-dates that program by many years. A key 
aspect of Shotest which distinguishes it from many others is its dependence 
on substantial analysis at each node, which gives it a node rate as low as 
20,000 per second."