Aart's Blog

Group F has just finished a complete thirty seconds-per-move tournament, played from both sides of all positions in the Nunn opening suite under the conditions described earlier. Congratulations to Evert Glebbeek for Jazz 's promotion to Group E! All games can be downloaded from the tournament page .                 1        2         3         4         5  1 Jazz v5.01 JA    *     15.5-4.5  18.0-2.0  18.5-1.5  19.5-0.5 71.5/80 2 ZCT-0.3.2500  4.5-15.5     *     13.5-6.5  17.0-3.0  16.0-4.0 51.0/80 3 BikJump v2.1  2.0-18.0  6.5-13.5     *     12.5-7.5  12.0-8.0 33.0/80 4 tscp181       1.5-18.5  3.0-17.0  7.5-12.5     *     12.5-7.5 24.5/80 5 umax48w       0.5-19.5  4.0-16.0  8.0-12.0  7.5-12.5     *    20.0/80

Charles Bond wrote a nifty 6502 simulator, called Soft6502 , which I find useful for testing small programs written for the 65xx microprocessor family. The simulator supports the full 6502 instruction set and two 8-bit ports for input and output.   Programs can be entered one byte at the time through the keyboard or, more conveniently, loaded from file. The simulator uses the H6X file format , which is a simple, but surprisingly versatile way of representing 6502 code (essentially an ASCII representation of addresses followed by bytes). I have extended my 65xx cross-assembler (available for Windows, Linux, and MacOS) to support this H6X file format, so that its output can be directly fed into Soft6502.

I just released version 3.0.2 of Chess for Android, available at the Android market and as direct download . This release enhances XBoard/WinBoard support (infinite analysis, resign feature, older idioms used by various engines).

I completed a qualification tournament from both sides of the first Nunn position at one-second per move on a Nexus One (1GHz Snapdragon). Where applicable, UCI engines were given an 8MB hash table and 1MB endgame tablebases cache (the complete 3- and 4-piece Nalimov, Gaviota, Scorpio, and Robbobases endgame tablebases reside on SD card). XBoard engines play at their default settings. Since the Nexus One is a single-core device, "pondering" was disabled The qualification results are used to split the engines into separate groups. Engines in each group will play each other at longer time controls, starting with the lowest group. The number one in each group will promote to the next group. The cross-table and all games can be downloaded from the tournament page .

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