Aart's Blog

Chess of Android supports setting up Nalimov, Gaviota, and Scorpio endgame tablebases on the SD card, but Robbobases were missing. Therefore, I added support for RobboTotalBases as well. I tested the setup with the UCI engine IvanHoe 999947c (modified slightly to relax file permissions when reading) and the /3 and /4 piece directories on the SD card. The engine reports info string 66 RobboTotalBases registered with 2499 indici 0mb and plays simple endgames flawlessly afterwards. The setup will be in the next release of Chess for Android.

I compiled Vladimir Medvedev's UCI engine GreKo for Android (ARM) for use in  Chess for Android  and put the binary on UCI engines for Android (with kind permission of Vladimir). Below a screenshot and the results of a few quick matches with other engines on a Nexus S (1GHz Hummingbird) with 32MB hash and Nalimov/Gaviota/Scorpio endgame tablebases on SD card. Greko 8.0 - RobboLito 0.085e4l     0.0 - 10.0  +0/-10/=0   0.00% Greko 8.0 - IvanHoe-Beta v999947c  0.5 - 9.5   +0/-9/=1    5.00% Greko 8.0 - Stockfish 2.0          1.0 - 9.0   +1/-9/=0   10.00% Greko 8.0 - Rotor 0.6a             3.0 - 7.0   +2/-6/=2   30.00% Greko 8.0 - Gaviota v0.80.0.107    5.5 - 4.5   +4/-3/=3   55.00% Greko 8.0 - GNU Chess 5.07.153.3b  6.0 - 4.0   +6/-4/=0   60.00% Greko 8.0 - RedQueen 0.9.5         6.5 - 3.5   +5/-2/=3   65.00% Greko 8.0 - BikJump v2.1P         10.0 - 0.0   +10/-0/=0 100.00% Greko 8.0 - ZCT-0.3.2500          10.0 - 0.0   +10/-0/=0 100.00%

Multi-core Android devices are becoming more widespread. Therefore, v2.8.2. of Chess for Android, available from the Android Market or as direct download , adds support for setting up UCI engines with parallel search. Unfortunately, the UCI protocol did not standardize the option name for parallel search (despite some efforts ) so the GUI simply looks in the UCI engine output for commonly used option names like "Cores", "Processors", "Threads", and "CPUs". The GUI then presents this choice in the option setup window (always labeled as CPUs), and eventually sends any selected value back to the engine using the recognized option name. Please let me know if you would like to see alternative option names for other UCI engines on Android with parallel search. As for all other options, only option values supported by the engine can be selected in the setup window. Below a screenshot of the new UCI option setup window.

It is nice to hear that others sometimes find my toy projects useful. As I reported in an earlier blog entry , a while back I implemented a 6510 cross-assembler to relive the good old times of programming a Commodore 64. Today I got an email from Antonino Brisindi who is using this assembler to burn an EPROM for his home-made 6502-based microcomputer. Below you see a picture of his impressive project in progress.

Marc F. Ferguson is writing about experiences with rooting the Nook Color on his blog FergyTech and he kindly emailed me the following pictures of Chess for Android running on the Nook Color. It is cool to see so many new devices running Android. Thanks Marc!