Chess for Android 2.5

[Michel Van den Bergh]

Thanks for the tourney. I observed similar results although the nps of toga2 seemed to be significantly higher than that of stockfish.

Unfortunately the binary I posted was accidentally compiled for two threads. I replaced it with a binary compiled for one thread (dual core phones are still rare).

Apparently the segfaults I observed were due to the fact that my son's phone is heavily overclocked. It seems that toga2
stressed it too much.

[AartBik]

Version 2.5.1 of Chess for Android simplifies installing third party UCI engines quite a bit. Most importantly, it is no longer required to install the Android SDK in order to push binaries to the Android device. Instead, UCI engines can simply be copied to the SD card and, from there, installed into internal memory. A big thank you to Michel Van den Bergh for inspiring me to simplify the installation process.

[Michel Van den Bergh]

The new simplified installation method worked flawlessly on my son's HTC Wildfire (with custom firmware though). This is great progress I think.

Here is a port of RobboLito 0.085g3l (downloaded from http://www.chesslogik.com/).

http://alpha.uhasselt.be/Research/Algeb ... to-android

This is a quick and dirty port. People are welcome to do better. Since I don't know ARM assembler I simply replaced the asm bits by gcc intrinsics. Those shouldn't be too bad. I also reduced the default hash from 256Mb to 16Mb.

[thorstenczub]

i downloaded "chess" from the market a few minutes ago, put all engines on sd-card and told the gui to install them. cool.
as easy as it is under arena or shredder or any other PC chess gui.

well done aart.

now my android device develops into a chess device.

[AartBik]

Thanks for early testing Michel and Thorsten!

[AartBik]

Games available at http://www.aartbik.com/MISC/eng.html.

Code: Select all

                             1          2          3          4          5          6          7          8          
1   RobboLito 0.085g3l       ********** 1½1½100111 1½1½101011 0111111110 11111½1111 1111111111 1111111111 1111111111  61.5/70 
2   Stockfish 2.0            0½0½011000 ********** 111½0½½½½½ 101½011111 1111111111 1111111111 1111111111 1111111111  56.5/70 
3   Crab 1.0 beta            0½0½010100 000½1½½½½½ ********** ½011111111 1111111111 1111111111 1111111111 1111111111  55.5/70 
4   Toga II 1.4.1SE          1000000001 010½100000 ½100000000 ********** 111½111100 1111111111 11½1111111 1111111111  43.0/70 
5   GNU Chess 5.07.153.3b-32 00000½0000 0000000000 0000000000 000½000011 ********** 111½111111 1111½11111 1111111111  32.0/70 
6   BikJump v1.8             0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 000½000000 ********** 010101½111 1½1101½010  13.0/70 
7   BikJump v2.1P            0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 00½0000000 0000½00000 101010½000 ********** ½01100½1½1  10.0/70 
8   ZCT-0.3.2500             0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0½0010½101 ½10011½0½0 **********   8.5/70 

[thorstenczub]

yes, i had a similar 9-1 result for stockfish

we need more and different engines.

[AartBik]

Even though the UCI standard states that the GUI should parse all options and build a dialog for the user to change settings, I will take a much easier approach in the next release of Chess for Android (although hopefully still an improvement over the current lack of ways to change settings). I have picked a few common options (hash table size, endgame tablebases settings, and Elo strength settings) and present these to the user with a dialog that is populated with the default values (or "off" if absent). See screenshot.

If you have an interest in this project, and have a strong opinion on other options that would be useful, please drop me an email.

[AartBik]

I just posted version 2.5.5 with the following extensions.

• Ability to save games to SD card. Games are appended in PGN format to file /sdcard/games.pgn on the SD card, so that users can examine these later, for example, in a chess application on the desktop.
• Ability to define common UCI engine options in a pop-up window: hash table size, ELO strength restriction, endgame tablebases formats (Nalimov, Gaviota, or Scorpio) and cache size. The options are populated with the engine's defaults.

I tested the three different tablebases formats with various engines, with special thanks to Michel Van den Bergh for providing a modified Toga version and separate probing code library for the Scorpio bitbases, available at his website. Simply install the probing library as an UCI engine, so it will be in the same path as the UCI engine binary.

[Macarel]

HI!

I take the opportunity of your posting here to adress an issue that I may be the only one to care about.
Could you add some more chess pieces to the app ((and maybe some board colors)? I have a 10" tablet and the 2 sets look horrible (my opinion for what it is worth), merida and / or alpha would be most welcome.

Once again, sorry to bother you about this minor issue.