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Android Chess Programs

Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2011 3:24 pm
by Swaminathan
It appears there are now more chess softwares for Android than for Iphone. :)

I also like it that there are so many reviews/ratings of each chess softwares and other applications.

I wonder if there's any software with huge database of GM games? SCID doesn't come with games, I guess we will have to import the games?

It appears that there are two different programs that use Stockfish. Chess King and Droidfish, what's up with that? The features look alike but the graphics is different.

Re: Android Chess Programs

Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2011 5:09 pm
by Michel Van den Bergh
It appears that there are two different programs that use Stockfish.
Chess for Android can also use Stockfish. It can run arbitrary UCI engines provided they have been compiled for ARM.

Re: Android Chess Programs

Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2011 6:24 pm
by Jeremy Bernstein
The one thing I really miss on Android is an openings trainer, and some better training modes when using PGNs for tactical testing. Otherwise, everything else is more or less covered at this point.

Re: Android Chess Programs

Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2011 8:39 pm
by Swaminathan
Jeremy Bernstein wrote:The one thing I really miss on Android is an openings trainer, and some better training modes when using PGNs for tactical testing. Otherwise, everything else is more or less covered at this point.
Agreed. I found SCID on the go fantastic! I have successfully managed to import many games as Pgn into Scid.

What I'd like to see is the puzzle mode of Tactics collections to randomize the positions, the timer to indicate the seconds elapsed, and also the score tracker.

Re: Android Chess Programs

Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2011 8:46 pm
by Swaminathan
Michel Van den Bergh wrote:
It appears that there are two different programs that use Stockfish.
Chess for Android can also use Stockfish. It can run arbitrary UCI engines provided they have been compiled for ARM.
Yes, I know. I find it interesting that ChessKing and Droidfish are exactly similar except the board color.

ChessKing appears to use chessbase GUI board color while Droidfish uses winboard screen.

Re: Android Chess Programs

Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2011 9:24 pm
by Michel Van den Bergh
DroidFish is an Android port of the very strong Stockfish 2.0 chess engine. The Android version can often search 15 ply or deeper on a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU.

Features:
- Opening books
- Clocks
- Analyze mode
- Two player mode
- Edit board
- PGN import/export/edit
- One Touch Moves
- Color themes
- Animated moves
- Scid DB support using "Scid on the go"
- Free, GPLv3

Package: org.petero.droidfish
Chess King is an Android port of the very strong Stockfish 2.0 chess engine. The Android version can often search 15 plays a second or deeper on a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU.

Chess King features touch screen or trackball input. Supports full game navigation buttons, Open Books/PGN export to clipboard, and save/load as files. Engine plays at various levels.

Features:
- Opening books
- Clocks
- Analyze mode
- Two player mode
- Edit board
- PGN import/export/edit
- One Touch Moves
- Color themes
- Animated moves
- Scid DB support using "Scid on the go"

Package: com.skitapps.chessking

Re: Android Chess Programs

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2011 12:09 pm
by gekko
Michel Van den Bergh wrote:
DroidFish is an Android port of the very strong Stockfish 2.0 chess engine. The Android version can often search 15 ply or deeper on a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU.
Package: org.petero.droidfish
Chess King is an Android port of the very strong Stockfish 2.0 chess engine. The Android version can often search 15 plays a second or deeper on a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU.

Chess King features touch screen or trackball input. Supports full game navigation buttons, Open Books/PGN export to clipboard, and save/load as files. Engine plays at various levels.
Package: com.skitapps.chessking
Chess King is just a ripoff of DroidFish Chess (beware: there's also a ripoff called DroidFish for which you have to pay). Chess King is IMHO in violation of the GPL (as source is not provided) and it needs one more permission to run than DroidFish Chess: full internet access.

So the question is: if it is a copy of DroidFish Chess then why does it need full internet access?
Therefore I regard Chess King as Android market spam.

Cheers,
Gerhard

Re: Android Chess Programs

Posted: Sun Mar 13, 2011 12:34 am
by thorstenczub
there is a benchmark a guy did with the ipad2 against tegra2 platforms:

Image

so it seems the 1 Ghz Tegra2 hardware of the Xoom
is still ahead of the ipad2.

source:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381767,00.asp

Re: Android Chess Programs

Posted: Sun Mar 13, 2011 3:52 am
by JackStraw
From Tord Romstad on CCC :

That's a badly flawed benchmark. Because all iOS devices until now has had single-core CPUs, Stockfish for iOS uses only a single search thread. The new iPad 2, however, has a dual-core CPU. The next Stockfish version will of course use both cores, and will be almost twice as fast on the iPad 2. This makes the iPad 2 almost three times faster than the iPad 1 when running chess programs (at least Stockfish), and also faster than the Motorola Xoom tested in the above benchmark (unless Stockfish was using a single thread there, too).

I e-mailed the author and informed him about his mistake.

http://74.220.23.57/forum/viewtopic.php ... 4&start=20