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Chess for serious players?
Posted: Sun Aug 14, 2005 9:24 pm
by cynric
I've used a few chess programs for linux and they all lacked something (or a lot). Most had buggy interfaces. Others had poor engines. And still others were written more as a side project and not meant for serious play and/or study. Chessmaster comes to mind for the Windows crowd however I prefer something more along the lines of Fritz. Does anyone know of a comparable program for linux? If there isn't, is there an ongoing forum to push developers to look at the linux community? I just had a chess twitch today and, sadly, remembered that nothing exists. I understand that one could use wine, but that is a work around in my opinion. Any comments would be appreciated.
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2005 12:46 am
by Reikinio
what about gnuchess and crafty ?
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2005 1:29 am
by cynric
I don't recall xboard being a pleasure to work with, but ... I was running an older computer with SuSE installed. I just installed gnuchess and using my own board which works just fine for my needs. I've only briefly kept up with chess apps in linux since my SuSE install (which was a source of a lot of frustration). Either way, thanks for the nudge.
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2005 2:40 am
by Reikinio
no problem,
Here are some alternatives to xboard if you don't like its look and feel,
http://freshmeat.net/projects/glchess/
or if you use KDE:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/slibo/
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2005 6:58 am
by nbkolchin
eboard for playing.
scid for analyzing.
Both support crafty engine.
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2005 10:57 am
by MetalGod
crafty is a powerful engine-
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2005 2:26 pm
by cynric
Thanks for the responses. I'll have to give crafty a shot over the weekend.
Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 3:00 am
by fe
You can run windows-only UCI chess engines (eg. shredder) in scid, using wine and a protocol UCI-to-Xboard adapter called polyglot.
If anybody cares, i can put together an howto
Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 3:12 am
by cynric
That'd be interesting. However, in my case, amd64 and wine don't play well together. But, that's another issue.
wow
Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2005 8:15 am
by fe
I did a little bit of research and i'm happy to announce, that finally a strong linux native gpl'd chess engine is available.
Its name is Fruit 2.1, a UCI engine which arrived second at the recent 13th world computer chess championship
(
http://www.ru.is/wccc05/default.asp?Page=Notepad&ID=3 ) scoring 8.5/11, one point ahead of well known Shredder.
It's also already reaching the top of computer chess rating lists, competing with latest Fritz and Shredder.
This is the page where you can download Fruit and Polyglot (the uci2wb adapter which will make it run together with
scid, eboard, etc..)
http://arctrix.com/nas/fruit/
have fun
Posted: Sat Sep 03, 2005 2:03 pm
by ryoshu
New project, next generation for scid, if you want to help feel free
http://newscid.sourceforge.net/
Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2005 2:12 am
by khiloa
crafty and glchess look like a sweet combonation, I will have to try them out sometime.
Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2005 11:18 pm
by indianiec
Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2005 12:35 am
by MJOE
When I was at ohio state, I was one of the top chess players there. This interests me.
Do they have an exact date of the release?
Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2005 2:37 am
by Vanquirius
Experimental ebuild for glchess in
bug 107056.
Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 7:04 am
by srz
Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 3:26 pm
by Paul Yard
I have a questions abount chess and I think this is the right place.
I use Crafty for analyzing (with scid) but I noted there is no opening book available in portage. I found some instructions in Internet on how to create the book downloading some files: small.zip, medium.zip or large(1, 2, 3).zip but I could not find them. I seems the links where superseded.
Anybody knows where to get a good book? ... and how to install it?
For playing on freechess I use jin. It's OK and fast enough on my machine.
thanks
pcs
Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2005 11:46 pm
by cynric
I still haven't had the opportunity to really explore the apps mentioned here. With regards to opening books, there is gnuchess-book which is an opening book for gnuchess. Whether or not it can plug into craft/scid or if you can just use the file itself and coerce it, I do not know.
Re: wow
Posted: Fri Dec 02, 2005 11:09 am
by gour
fe wrote:I did a little bit of research and i'm happy to announce, that finally a strong linux native gpl'd chess engine is available.
Its name is Fruit 2.1, a UCI engine which arrived second at the recent 13th world computer chess championship
(
http://www.ru.is/wccc05/default.asp?Page=Notepad&ID=3 ) scoring 8.5/11, one point ahead of well known Shredder.
It's also already reaching the top of computer chess rating lists, competing with latest Fritz and Shredder.
Anyone tried commercial Fruit-2.2.1 on Linux (amd64)
Edit: I came in contact with support stuff and here is the Linux demo, albeit of limited stregnth (it replies almost instantenously), but I'm happy to report that it works nicely under Jose front-end
and taking into consideration that it costs only 30â¬, it is not-so-expensive for those wanting to play against the No. #2 on the latest
WCCC 
This is the page where you can download Fruit and Polyglot (the uci2wb adapter which will make it run together with scid, eboard, etc..)
I just bumped against
Jose-chess -- a wonderful front-end supporting Xboard & UCI protocol, MySQL database, 3D view...
Anyone knows for some ebuild for it
Sincerely,
[/url]Gour
Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 4:58 am
by j_c_p
Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 7:21 am
by gour
j_c_p wrote:Whaou
:
Very nice to have such great program under linux.
Indeed
How did you install it? System-wide or under $HOME
I'll contact author if it can be mad a little bit more system-wide-installe-friendly 'cause installing it under e.g.
gives me lot of exception errors due to perms - probably database access problem
So, it would be nice to provide an ebuild for it
Sincerely,
Gour
Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 8:29 am
by j_c_p
Well, i have installed Jose in another directory than home, but it has the same properties (in fact, /mnt/divers/test/chess/jose
).
Last shot :
http://img483.imageshack.us/my.php?image=jose199ai.png
To launch it, i do the following : /usr/local/jdk1.5.0_06/jre/bin/java -jar /mnt/divers/test/chess/jose/jose.jar (with a local 32 bits jsdk, because i'm running Gentoo x86_64 with 1.4.2 64 bits java sdk).
I have noticed that 32 bits jsdk is a necessity for 3D board.
No problem for me in order to run Jose (and i try several AI as you can see above).
regards,
jcp.
Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 8:44 am
by gour
j_c_p wrote:Well, i have installed Jose in another directory like home (in fact, in /mnt/divers/test/chess/jose
).
Last shot :
http://img483.imageshack.us/my.php?image=jose199ai.png
To launch it, i do the following /usr/local/jdk1.5.0_06/jre/bin/java -jar /mnt/divers/test/chess/jose/jose.jar (with a local 32 bits jsdk, because i'm running Gentoo x86_64 with java 1.4.2 sdk 64 bits).
Hmm, I'm in the same boat running x86_64 but I have Sun's 32bit java-1.5.x
No problem for me in oder to running Jose (and i try several AI as you can see above).
I can also run Jose but under $HOME
Are you enthusiastic to try to put some ebuild together
You can also ask on Jose forums for a 64-bit version
btw, I think I'm going to register Fruit-2.2.1
For 30⬠+ Jose (after implementing engine vs. engine & time-control for both white & black features, I'll donate something to the project too) one gets high-quality engine with a very nice GUI (I like GTK+ theme
)
Sincerely,
Gour
Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 8:58 am
by j_c_p
For an ebuild, i don't know, but i can try to do one in a few days in order to test the ebuild process (however, jsdk 32 bits would be necessary indeed).
I've seen Fruit-2.2.1 too, but i'm not a great chess player, at the moment i'm trying different AI, to see which one is not too strong for me
.
best,
jcp.
Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 9:19 am
by gour
j_c_p wrote:For an ebuild, i don't know, but i can try to do one in a few days in order to test the ebuild process (however, jsdk 32 bits would be necessary indeed).
Great
I put several ebuilds together but do not have much experience with Java - actually Jose is the only Java program I use
I've seen Fruit-2.2.1 too, but i'm not a great chess player, at the moment i'm trying different AI, to see which one is not too strong for me
.
I'm also in the category of
patzer 
but want to support Linux development.
otoh, I asked Fruit devs to incorporate 'personality' feature (like e.g. in Deep Sjeng) and playing on a weker levels, and, afaics, both things are on
to do list.
Besides that, I submitted a feature request to Jose author to implement separate time-controls for both white & black players. That's another trick how to cheat, i.e. giving opponent 5mins against your 2 hours
Sincerely,
Gour
