TalkChess.com

I just released version 2.5 of Chess for Android at the Android market. Besides a few minor improvements, this release introduces the ability to play engine-engine matches automatically.

To perform a match:

• Long-press, import UCI engine, and select primary engine (or skip this step to play against the built-in Java engine)
• Long-press, engine-engine match, and select secondary engine to start the match

This will play 10 games from random openings at the moves-per-second level selected. During the match, current standing is displayed and engine analysis output is shown at the bottom of the window. Afterwards, the full match annotated with engine analysis can be found in the file /data/local/eng/match.pgn (use adb pull /data/local/eng/match.pgn to move the file from the phone to your computer). I recommend keeping the phone connected to the USB cable during a match for power.

Information on the setup is given at http://www.aartbik.com/MISC/uchess.html.

Version 2.5.1 of Chess for Android simplifies installing third party UCI engines quite a bit. Most importantly, it is no longer required to install the Android SDK in order to push binaries to the Android device. Instead, UCI engines can simply be copied to the SD card and, from there, installed into internal memory. A big thank you to Michel Van den Bergh for inspiring me to simplify the installation process.

Even though the UCI standard states that the GUI should parse all options and build a dialog for the user to change settings, I will take a much easier approach in the next release of Chess for Android (although hopefully still an improvement over the current lack of ways to change settings). I have picked a few common options (hash table size, endgame tablebases settings, and Elo strength settings) and present these to the user with a dialog that is populated with the default values (or "off" if absent). For a screenshot, see http://www.open-chess.org/viewtopic.php ... 4&start=17

If you have an interest in this project, and have a strong opinion on other options that would be useful, please drop me a private message or email.

Version 2.5.5 of Chess for Android will add control over the following common UCI options, populated by the engine's default, and restricted to the engine's provided min and max values where applicable.

• hash table size
• ELO strength restriction
• endgame tablebases formats and cache size
  • Nalimov, default folder /sdcard/tb
  • Gaviota, default folder /sdcard/gtb
  • Scorpio bitbases, default folder /sdcard/egbb

The default folder is just suggested in the setup window, but can be changed if required. I have tested each tablebase format with an engine that has corresponding support. For instance, in a KR vs. K endgame between Toga II 1.4.1SE with and without Scorpio bitbases, the former evaluates around 5000 while the latter still evaluates around -500, so the bitbases seem to work (Toga does not directly output "tb" information).