Aart's Blog

I made various improvements in the WinBoard/XBoard implemention in Chess for Android and are now able to successfully import and play with the following XBoard engines (I also tested the corrected UCI sungorus engine). Crafty 23.4                  Robert Hyatt scorpio 2.7                  Daniel Shawul sloppy 0.22                  Ilari Pihlajisto tscp1.81                     Tom Kerrigan sungoros-14-ja               Pablo Vazquez Below, I posted the cross-table of a quick test tournament from both sides of just the  first  position of the Nunn opening suite .                      1  2  3  4  5  6   1 scorpio            ** 01 11 11 11 11   9.0/10 2 crafty             10 ** ½1 1½ 11 11   8.0/10 3 sloppy             00 ½0 ** ½1 11 11   6.0/10 4 Sungorus 1.4 JA    00 0½ ½0 ** 11 11   5.0/10 5 tscp181            00 00 00 00 ** 11   2.0/10 6 Chess for Android  00 00 00 00 00 **   0.0/10

I ran tournaments between different versions of the same engine to determine which one would be their representative. Below I show the results of a fast round-robin tournaments using Chess for Android on a Nexus One, Nexus S, and Galaxy Tab with, where applicable, 8MB hash table and 1MB tablebases cache (Nalimov, Gaviota, Scorpio, and Robbobases reside on SD card). Each version played each other version from both sides of the Nunn opening suite . The number one engine will play in the longer time control tournament ( which is not always the latest  version; engine authors let me know if you prefer otherwise since some results were pretty close ). Also, Pablo Vazquez and Jim Ablett kindly worked together to fix the issue in the sungorus . It now runs correctly and will participate in the tournament. 1   BikJump v2.1P       10.5/20 2   BikJump v1.8         9.5/20 1   Diablo 0.5.1b JA    17.5/20 2   Diablo 0.5.1         2.5/20                   1   DoubleCheck 1.3     13.5/20 2

The list of UCI and XBoard engines for Android is getting longer, and I am pondering about a more serious tournament at longer time controls in Chess for Android . As a first step, I tested all available Android binaries. The list is shown below. An "X" indicates that the engine has trouble running in Chess for Android (if you are the engine author and are interested in fixing this, please contact me for details). Next, I probably do a few quick tournaments to divide the engine in groups by strength, followed by tournaments at longer time control. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in participating, if you don't know how to compile your engine for Android (ARM), or if you have good ideas about the format of this tournament. I am not really an experienced tournament manager, but merely do this for fun to get an idea of the relative strength of these engines. apilchess-106-ja           X    U. Lorenz, C. Donninger  bikjump1.8                      Aar

Version 3.0.1 of Chess for Android is available at the Android market and as direct download . It introduces the first, albeit simple support for the Chess Engine Communication Protocol (XBoard/WinBoard). Many features that are already supported for UCI (e.g. options setup, infinite analysis) as well as some XBoard specific features (e.g. resign) are still missing for this first version. I hope to add these features soon. Nevertheless, it is already possible to run tournaments between engines.

Chess for Android now contains sufficient functionality to perform the first inter-protocol tournament between the built-in Java engine, the UCI engine BikJump, and the WinBoard / XBoard engine Fairy-Max. Ten random opening book games between these engines at one second per move on a Nexus S ran without problems to completion with the following results.                     1          2          3           1 BikJump v2.1P     ********** 111½111111 1111111101 18.5/20 2 Fairymax 4.8Q     000½000000 ********** 1½10½11½01  7.0/20 3 Chess for Android 0000000010 0½01½00½10 **********  4.5/20