Aart's Blog

We made a road trip to Mount Shasta and back to view the solar eclipse 2012, Armed with a home-made pinhole camera made by two shoe boxes, we watched the eclipse in a safe way.  

Bob Newell's The Checker Maven is a very interesting online publication on Checkers and Draughts. This week's issue features checkers applications for Android. Bob looked at many checkers programs but concluded that the only two application that merit consideration are Checkers Tutor, by world class checker programmer Martin Fierz (author of CheckerBoard and the Cake computer engine), and .... Checkers for Android by yours truly! I am honored to receive this special mention by The Checker Maven. You can find the summary article at the main page . A more elaborate overview, including interviews with Martin and myself and be found in the full article . Many thanks to Bob for posting this article.

Revisiting checkers programming, I just released version 2.5 of Checkers for Android, both at the Google Play and as direct download . New features include: simple animation of captured pieces added a slight delay in single-move response added transposition table to engine more time controls The new animation and delay will hopefully make it more clear what move was just played. The transposition table should improve the engine strength a bit. UPDATE: version 2.5.1 improves the animation as shrinking pieces (some users thought the older fading pieces were "drag delay"!), adds more endgame knowledge, and shows kings more clearly.

A fun "Take Your Child to Work Day" at Google.

There was an interesting discussion on the TalkChess forum whether a chess GUI running on the Dalvik Virtual Machine could merely support a single protocol, and use an adapter, like Polyglot, to support other protocols. Even though Chess for Android already supports both UCI and XBoard/WinBoard, I was intrigued by the question, and decided to give it a try. First, I compiled the polyglot sources for ARM-based Android devices (I had to make a few source changes to make that work). Then I edited a polyglot.ini file pointing to my own UCI engine bikjump1.8 compiled for ARM: [Polyglot] EngineCommand=bikjump1.8 EngineName=BikJumpAsXBoard EngineDir=/data/local/tmp/ [Engine] And gave it a try directly from the command line: $ ./polyglot_for_android PolyGlot 1.4.67b by Fabien Letouzey. new st 1 post go 1 -1 0 1 h4 1 +0 0 3 h3 1 +2 0 6 g3 1 +12 0 20 Nh3 1 +17 0 22 Nf3 2 +0 0 46 Nf3 Nf6 3 +17 0 148 Nf3 Nf6 Nc3 4 +0 1 772 Nf3 Nf6 Nc3 Nc6 5 +2 2 1691 Nf3 Nf6 Nc3 Nc6 g3 6 +