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Windows chess engines tend to hog the glory (most commercial engines are Windows-only and many tournaments are run only on Windows machines), so to redress the balance for Linux users, I've taken the top 50 or so CCRL 40/4 engines (cutoff point, for fun, is those stronger than Carlsen's human blitz ELO rating) and produced a Linux-centric version of the list:

https://linuxchess.richardlloyd.org.uk/

Some "extra" features on there:

* Stockfish latest development version info is displayed rather than Stockfish 10 (rating calculated by linear interpolation as explained in the page notes) and is auto-updated when the abrok.eu builds are updated.

* Links to source code, Linux binaries (or Windows binaries if Wine has to be used), engine home page and Chess Programming Wiki page. Also an indicator if the Linux version is native, needs Wine, doesn't work on Linux or is unknown (i.e. a commercial engine I don't have).

* When CCRL 40/4 is updated, the page will auto-update within 8 hours and include positional/rating/version/new engine indicators between the last two CCRL 40/4 lists (shown in green for an improvement and pink for a worsening).

* The current human blitz leader (the cut-off point w.r.t. ratings) is shown as the last entry in the table and is auto-updated whenever the rating/leader at https://2700chess.com/ changes.

* The ratings table can be downloaded as a CSV should you want to do some processing on it yourself.

Many thanks to the CCRL folks for providing such a great list I could derive my page from.

This is a nice overview over the engines running on Linux.

A couple of remarks:

Senpai requires a ucinewgame command before go infinite. Protector can be compiled from source, but you need to do some small modifications to the makefile.

Spark is closed source, but the author provided binaries for linux, too.

Unfortunately some closed source engines like Hiarcs, Rybka and some earlier Houdini versions will not work properly using wine. (After typing go infinite, the engines will run forever and not respond to input).

The source code for Carlsen is not available, what a pity.

I've tried building and running Senpai 2.0 on both CentOS 7 and Fedora 29 (they have different g++ and clang++ compiler versions) both with g++ and clang++, plus tried "ucinewgame" before "go inifinite" - all attempts ended up with a segmentation violation and core dump. Now I know someone's got it running on Linux, I'll try a few more Linux distros in VMs to see if I can get it working too (Ubuntu being an obvious first one to try).

I had real trouble trying to find any reference to Spark 1.0 on the internet. SparkChess at https://www.sparkchess.com/ seemed to dominate my Google searches, but is commercial and not at version 1.0. Does anyone have a URL for Spark 1.0 (ideally a home page, but a Linux binary download link would be OK too)?

As for a Magnus source/binary, the closest you can get is "Play Magnus" but unfortunately only available as an iOS and Android app (yes, I got Linux Stockfish to beat every single Magnus age level available just to make sure it was a weaker engine ).

For pedants amongst you, there are still some engines in the list that don't correctly run on Linux (either natively or via Wine), but I felt that leaving them out would create gaps in the list, causing position misalignments if someone compared the original CCRL list with the one I created. I've also already had someone question why engines that need Wine are included - as far as I'm concerned, if they run properly with Wine, that makes them a binary that runs on Linux, so that means that they should be included.

rkl wrote: ↑Sat Jan 05, 2019 6:54 pm I had real trouble trying to find any reference to Spark 1.0 on the internet. SparkChess at https://www.sparkchess.com/ seemed to dominate my Google searches, but is commercial and not at version 1.0. Does anyone have a URL for Spark 1.0 (ideally a home page, but a Linux binary download link would be OK too)?

You should always look here first:

http://www.computer-chess.org/doku.php? ... ngine_list

or at my XB/UCI chronology (link in my signature), its intention was exactly to find all infos and links in one place when I set it up in 2002

well, the link you looked for still exists at wayback
https://web.archive.org/web/20120302103 ... ink/spark/

I'd seen the Chess Engines List before and really should have gone to visit that again to look for engines like Spark. I've now updated my list to include Spark's home page/download and that it works natively on Linux.

I'd only been testing engines from the command line and it looks like some engines only initialise properly when particular UCI commands are issued (i.e. they don't work straight away with just "go infinite"). The two commands I found I needed weren't "ucinewgame", but actually "uci" (for Alfil) and "isready" (for Senpai). I've therefore updated my list w.r.t. Alfil and Senpai.

I did eventually get Protector built on Linux using g++, removing -static and -lstdc++ from the linking and adding "typedef volatile int pthread_spinlock_t;" to tablebase.c. Hence, Protector info has been updated on the list too.

Thanks for this list, I have been looking for such a list for months!

Are those all engines which you have run on Linux?

Everything in the list with "Native" or "Wine" in the Linux? column will run on Linux. You may need a recent distro and the very latest Wine though for some of the binaries. You may need to compile source code in some cases too where the binary isn't supplied - again, some source may need a fairly recent gcc/g++. All engines marked Native/Wine have been personally checked by me to ensure they work (CentOS 7 or, where necessary, Fedora 29).

I have a cut-off of Carlsen's human ELO blitz rating (yes, I know, it's not the same as computer ELO) w.r.t. the list, so there's obviously going to be weaker engines that aren't listed that can run on Linux.

Interesting to see that the latest CCRL 40/4 list has Komodo MCTS jumping a huge 95 ELO and has caused a top 5 change for the first time in a while. I'm assuming CCRL will switch to testing the "normal" Komodo (12.3) at some point because 11.2 is 18 months old now.

rkl wrote: ↑Sun Jan 13, 2019 3:23 amI'm assuming CCRL will switch to testing the "normal" Komodo (12.3) at some point because 11.2 is 18 months old now.

Several newer versions have been tested since v11.2:
These are just single-core versions. For the complete list see the Komodo family page here. The MCTS versions now have their own family page.

Apologies for missing that Komodo 12 had indeed been tested at 40/4. What's very surprising is that Komodo 12 actually shows a slight ELO drop compared to Komodo 11! In fact, 11.31 dropped compared to 11.2 as well - not great if you're trying to get people to upgrade It also explains why I missed it - CCRL lists the strongest version, not the latest one.