Aart's Blog

As a CS student, a long time ago in a country far away, I was very interested in AI (Artificial Intelligence), and not just for chess playing programs. In fact, if it weren't for my professor convincing me to continue with compilers and high-performance computing, I may have ended up specializing in the field of AI. Perhaps lucky for me, since AI has gone through many rounds of boom-and-bust. Nowadays, however, machine learning in general, and deep learning in particular really seem to have taken AI in a very promising new direction. Since I feel machine learning will become an important, if not mandatory skill for computer scientists, I decided to buy a few books on TensorFlow and familiarize myself with the new paradigm. For starters, I bought the three O'Reilly books below (other recommendations are welcome) and plan to do a few brief follow-up posts on this topic.

After all the fun I had connecting Chess for Android with the Millennium  over Bluetooth, I was curious if I could provide similar support for the DGT electronic chess boards. Some of these have Bluetooth capabilities, most use USB connections, and some older models, like the one I have, still use the RS-232 connector. To my pleasant surprise, by combining the original serial cable of DGT with a USB-to-serial cable and a female-USB-to-USB-C cable, I was able to get an actually working connection between my DGT board and my tablet or phone. Next was implementing support in Chess for Android. Luckily, DGT kindly shared the protocol documentation with me, and after a fun weekend of hacking, Chess for Android now proudly supports DGT electronic chess boards as well.

Recently I have been very active adding new features to Chess for Android again. I have added support to connect to the Millennium ChessGenuis Exclusive electronic chessboard, added a new piece set (thanks Bryan Whitby), added various engine related features requested by users, and switched to the much better model where users can enable (and thus disable) permissions just for the features they like. Now, I also added optional piece animation and algebraic notation on the board. Hopefully this makes watching ongoing tournaments more smooth, as illustrated below for a match between Komodo and DiscoCheck. Keep an eye on Google Play for updates!

Did you ever wonder what an Android phone screen looks like under a microscope? So did I. So at the start of this weekend, I got the microscope out and took some photos, collected in one picture below. The results are amazing. What looks white to the naked eye, is really a large field of RGB (red-green-blue) elements under magnification. All colors are, of course, obtained by adjusting the brightness of each RGB element appropriately, as illustrated in this picture too.

I am rolling out Chess for Android version 5.4 on Google Play . Besides minor improvements, the major new feature consists of draw and resign adjudication during chess engines tournaments. As shown below, a new tournament dialog has been implemented which shows, besides familiar older options, a section for draw and resign adjudication. If during a game, after the given move number and during the given move count, the score drops below the requested draw score (in cp) or exceeds the requested resign score (in cp, either consistently for white or for black), the game is adjudicated rather than played in full. This feature has been requested many times by tournament managers to avoid wasting time playing e.g. boring drawn games until the 50-move rule applies. See this talkchess posting for an example game. As usual, let me know if you encounter problems with the new release. Also, I could use some help translating the new strings into several languages (most will display Eng