Opening Book

-
I added an opening book to Chess for Android. The opening book is small (slightly over 150 opening lines) and simple (transpositions are not recognized, unless the line is explicitly stored). Nevertheless, since the engine picks a matching line at random during the opening, the variety of play will increase. Version v1.2.8 (and onwards) supports the opening book, as well as a new copy-to-clipboard feature (more about that later).

While still in an opening line, the message "opening" appears at the position that usually shows the engine evaluation, as shown below.

Comments

greenchile505 said…
THANK YOU KIND SIR. For the PGN export feature, which I will use often, and the opening book which will add tremendous variety for addicts like me.

I'm off to leave positive comments at the Market.

Also, please ignore driveling idiots who post lazy, grammatically flawed comments. I've read you CV. You've worked too hard and have contributed so much to CS to let entitled whiners rain on your day. If they do not like your software, let them write their own GM level chess engine and port it to Android.

If I had 10% the talent and experience you have, I'd be writing software for the droid right now. As it is, I am only good at testing, maintenance, and documentation.

Good day.
March 18, 2010 at 1:50 PM
Aart Bik said…
Well, thank *you*. You just made my day :-)
March 18, 2010 at 3:03 PM
AgentIcarus said…
Awesome, an Opening Book! I was getting bored of e4 always being met by e5 - this could have just made Chess even better.

Yup - first try. e4 c5. Awesome.

Thanks!
March 19, 2010 at 6:38 AM
Anonymous said…
Any plans for hosting the source code publicly?
March 26, 2010 at 1:06 PM
Aart Bik said…
No, no direct plans for that.
March 29, 2010 at 4:47 PM
dragonfish said…
Ok I was thinking about painting the board with a wood texture. I've made a simple example in gimp to shown you an example: Chess for Android with simple wood texture.

I was also thinking about adding some basic animations. Please let me know if your willing to share the code.
March 30, 2010 at 11:04 AM
Aart Bik said…
Yes, the wood texture looks nice! Let me see if I can do something similar....
April 1, 2010 at 3:04 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Checkers Move Generation

-
I was able to make a small improvement in the checkers move generator (written in Java for the Android SDK). The following table shows run times of several perft depths before and after optimization when run on the emulator (which should mimic actual run times on the phone quite well). DEPTH #LEAF NODES ORIGINAL OPTIMIZED TIME TIME ==================================== 7 179740 2.9s 1.9s 8 845931 14.2s 9.7s 9 3963680 66.3s 45.6s 10 18391564 294.6s 208.7s P.S. Runtimes for a C++ checkers move generator on a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo are given at my checkers page .
Read more

Connecting Chess for Android to a Remote Server

-
Image
I have received several questions on how to connect Chess for Android running on an Android device (e.g. a phone) as client to a remote chess server (e.g. a powerful desktop), so I decided to write a small document with detailed instructions. What you will need: The server software from Bernhard Wallner's chess utilities , suited for your server's operating system (if, say, your desktop runs Windows, you will need to download the Windows version). You do not need to download the client software in this case. The network enabled version of Chess for Android . On the server, start the engine server software, and construct a new row for every engine you want to run remotely. Assign a name, port number, and select the full path to each engine binary (an executable that runs on the server). You can also supply command line options for starting the engine. Check the active checkboxes and click start when done. This yields something similar to the screenshots below. Here, I have s...
Read more

Connecting with the DGT Board

-
Image
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.
Read more