Chess for Android with UCI support released

[AartBik]

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 http://www.aartbik.com/MISC/uchess.html. As far as I know currently only BikJump is available as 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 on this page soon. Please note that support is still rather basic (only tested on one engine, GUI does not support engine options, time control is restricted to fixed time-per-move, no tournaments, etc.). Nevertheless, I hope it is an interesting start.

[thorstenczub]

with a little help from aart i got it working on my android 1.5 china-pad.

i have now the first UCI engine running on my device !
cool.

now the next thing i will try out is tablebases on my SD card ) accessed by
my touch-pad UCI engine bikjump !

[AartBik]

To use the limited screen size effectively, I am prototyping a way to display the current move considered by the UCI engine.
A small animation can be found at http://aartbik.blogspot.com/2010/08/animation-of-engine-moves.html.

[thorstenczub]

this feature is in all our dedicated chess computers, aart )

they even realize to show search depth and evals without having displays (e.g. saitek leonardo or CXG computer).

i would repeat each move 3 times, and pause between each half move, so the
user can better watch it.


further the dedicated chess computers let the FROM square longer ON.
so that you have

LONG short, long short, long short rythm for each half move of the main line.
IMO a good idea.

the fidelity computers allow to SELECT the info via piece square a1-h1 .

with pressing e1-h1 showing 1st-4th half move of the main line.
so the user can decide WHICH move he is interested.

in a1-d1 pressed the fidelity computers show time, search depth, nps, eval.

by pressing on a1-h1 (when the program computes) the user can choose which info he wants to get.

but i do not think you really need this.
it is only senseful on SMALL devices with SMALL screen resolution.
on a HTC Desire or my china-touch-pad (7") there is much space under the board.

if you implement it, please make it OPTIONAL because i think serious players prefer the method you use in the moment with the main line.
IMO you could use ALL the space below the board. and make it optional to either show
game-score or search info or both (display splitted under board).

but i would not replace it .

make it an option to choose so any user can decide which feature he wants to use.

[AartBik]

Note that in the demo I am just showing the move currently considered by the engine (currmove in UCI speak) in addition to the other information shown at the bottom (depth, score, speed, and principal variation). But all those ideas on showing the principal variation graphically sound really cool too! And yes, I would keep such a feature optional.

[thorstenczub]

ok. i see. i reread my last posting and i think they showed the destination square longer...
i will check this again )

[AartBik]

Because I have not received any natively compiled UCI engines from others yet, but I remain nevertheless enthusiastic to test Chess for Android on other engines, I downloaded a few UCI engines that have source code available. Code is not always easily portable, but Zach Wegner's ZCT gave relatively little trouble, and I was able to compile the ZCT engine "natively" for Android and successfully import it into Chess for Android.

uci1.png (39.91 KiB) Viewed 2217 times

[thorstenczub]

so now there are 2 UCI engines for android !
well done !

[AartBik]

Thorsten Czub suggested other interesting UCI engines with sources and I tried Crab1.0, which compiled successfully for Android as well.
I now have four UCI engines compiled for Android, which all import well into Chess for Android:

(1) Crab1.0 Beta by Tord Romstad, Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski, Adam Kleng
(2) ZCT0.3.2500 by Zach Wegner
(3) BikJumpv1.8 (mailbox representation)
(4) BikJumpv2.1 (bitboard representation)

uci1.png (33.94 KiB) Viewed 2125 times

uci2.png (55.14 KiB) Viewed 2125 times

[thorstenczub]

on my notebook with T7600 intel core2duo cpu, crab_64 with 1 cpu makes 297.000 NPS.

now lets benchmark the mobile devices: