Aart's Blog

I just released version 2.4.1 of Chess for Android with the following changes: Ability to install application on SD card Moved navigation buttons down Few improvements to UCI engine support To verify that UCI engine support works for third party engines as well (not just for BikJump), I downloaded sources of ZCT0.3.2500 (by Zach Wegner) and Crab1.0Beta (by Tord Romstad, Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski, Adam Kleng) and compiled these "natively" for Android. Importing and playing the engines work fine. As before, instructions on setting up an UCI engine are given at UCI for Android .

Because it is hard to print all information from the UCI engine on the phone screen, I am toying with a feature where the current move considered by the UCI engine is shown graphically. Below is a short demo of this feature. Let me know what you think!

I just released version 2.4 of Chess for Android at the Android Market with the following new feature: basic UCI engine support (ability to replace built-in Java engine with any third party UCI engine compiled "natively" for Android) Instructions on how to setup an UCI engine are given at UCI for Android . As far as I know currently only BikJump is available as stand-alone UCI engine for Android. Although stronger than the built-in engine, I hope I will be able to add links to much stronger third party UCI engines soon. Please note that support is still rather basic (elaborate setup, only tested on one engine, GUI does not support engine options, time control restricted to time-per-move, position sent as FEN, making the engine more prone to three-fold repetition, no tournaments, etc.). Nevertheless, I hope it is an interesting start.

Here is an UCI engine running on a Nexus One in Chess for Android, probing the complete 3- and 4-piece Nalimov endgame tablebases (29.6 MB) from SD card. Here is a screenshot where the UCI engine already reports a mate (using the tablebases), while the internal Java engine only reports a negative score for white given a search tree of depth 9. Steps to make this work are shown at UCI for Android .

The UCI engine output is now presented in a slightly better format, where information is broken up into individual fields. Also, I have compiled BikJump v2.1 natively for Android, which is more elaborate multi-threaded bitboard-based engine that also supports the Nalimov endgame tablebases (with kind permission from Eugene Nalimov and Andrew Kadatch). I copied a few tablebases into the emulator's SD card and started the engine analysis. As can be seen in the screenshot below, the engine together with the probing code run fine on the Android emulator.