UCI engine support for Android

[AartBik]

In Chess for Android, I currently use a built-in engine, basically a simplified Java port of the C++ engine BikJump. However, it makes sense to add UCI support in the GUI as well, which will enable importing any UCI engine that has been compiled "natively" for Android using the Android NDK. Therefore, I have been prototyping UCI support in Chess for Android. Some initial results of importing a natively compiled UCI engine as a "kibitzer" can be found on my blog (http://aartbik.blogspot.com/). For now, I am testing a natively compiled BikJumpv1.8, but feel free to send me other UCI engines compiled for Android if you want to expose those to early testing.

[thorstenczub]

very good. well done. Android is the future. i do hope that we will get many engines ported for all the new android devices to come.

thanks.

[AartBik]

Slightly better output of information from the UCI engine, running on an Android 1.5 emulator.

[AartBik]

I also compiled BikJump v2.1 natively for Android, which is a somewhat more elaborate multi-threaded bitboard-based engine that also supports the Nalimov endgame tablebases (with kind permission from Eugene Nalimov and Andrew Kadatch). To verify that the probing code works on Android, I copied a few tablebases into the phone's memory and started the engine analysis. As can be seen below, this works very well.

[thorstenczub]

from the SD card ?! cool.

so with a 16 GB SD card you can put the 8 GB tablebases on it and still have 8 GB space for music or
android stuff.

[AartBik]

from the SD card ?! cool.

Yes. In principle from any position the user can write and the application can read. The SD card is the most obvious place to keep such a large database.

info string found 3-piece nalimov tablebases on path /sdcard

[thorstenczub]

thanks !

i wonder where all the chess programmers are.
i do hope that we will see many ports for android.
IMO android, especially 2.2 is the future.

i will try to talk with a few programmers.

[AartBik]

Here is an UCI engine running on a Nexus One in Chess for Android, probing the complete 3- and 4-piece Nalimov endgame tablebases from SD card.

[thorstenczub]

cool.
now we need some more engine

i do hope that many programmers port their engine for android UCI !

how fast is the nexus ?
1 GHz CPU ?