The TSITO Chinese Chess Engine is the first of its kind; it was designed to be able to communicate to interfaces (graphical or otherwise) through a standard protocol.  All other Chinese Chess engines that the author is aware of where designed with the interface embedded into the engine or to communicate through an undocumented set of commands.  There are numerous advantages to keeping the interface seperate from the engine; for instance, an engine author need not concern themselves with major useability concerns so long as the engine is conformant since these problems are taken care of.

The first TSITO engine was written as part of a college project using an incomplete protocol. Version 2 of the engine will make use of a more complete protocol that is more in tune with the origional XBoard protocol written for Western Chess. Developers are also looking into what changes would need to be made to the UCI protocol to make it work with Chinese Chess.

The second version of the TSITO engine is a from-scratch rewrite using bitmap based board representation.  As far as the author knows this will make TSITO unique in the Chinese Chess community.  Also new in the second version will be compile time options to turn TSITO into a paralell engine capable of distributing itself across several cluster nodes and making use of SMP systems. The first testable version of this new TSITO engine, not including the paralell options, is expected to be available by July 31st, 2003.