picking engins to use for analysis in iPhone/iPad apps

[adams161]

Hi, I've an engine I've developed, Pulsar, but i'm looking for a stronger engine to use for regular chess analysis in an iPad/iPhone app. I think there's 3 criteria for the choice:

1) it's legal to use it in a closed source project integrated with the binary code. It would need to be in c or c++. I would import the code files and hopefully the engine can compile in iOS( I know crafty can). I am fine with giving attribution and linking to the code from the engine i use. Any idea on engines like this? I"m not clear on crafty's rights but a read of its rights made me think you could not link it in the binary and it had to run as a separate exe for legal reasons or you had to make your project open source.

2) the other consideration is there is documentation on how to interface with it. Something ideal would be just call the uci protocol function and feed it positions.

3) the third consideration is i dont care about the strongest engine, just a good engine, but my preference is for a reliable engine that is known not to hang/crash.


Mike

[kinderchocolate]

1. Crafty is already available on iOS, and in fact, Crafty's source code has explicit reference to its iOS build.

2. You don't need any documentation on interfacing because you don't need to modify the source code at all.

3. Crafty, MicroMax, Stockfish, Senpai, Discocheck and many more open source engines have been proven working on the iOS platform without any issue. MicroMax is the only engine without any restriction. Basically, if it works on Android, it works on iOS as well.

[adams161]

on 1) i actually compiled crafty in an iPhone app but i wasn't sure it its licence and what legal requirements there were to use it.

on 2) Yea i need to find some documentation on using it because i won't know what crafty functions to call to make it work and what to feed them. This would not be a pipe connected app like winboard. With winboard you launch the engine and attach the input output on a pipe. But with this i need to integrate it into the code and even if i dont make any changes to the crafty code i would need to know how to initialize it and what functions to call to start and stop it.

Mike

[ZirconiumX]

May I suggest Arasan with its MIT licence?

Matthew:out

[kinderchocolate]

I'll leave the licensing to Dr.Hyatt. No, you don't have to change anything in the Crafty source code so you don't have to understand at all how it works. You don't need to know anything other than the Winboard protocol. You don't need to mess around how it works internally. Just find where Crafty takes a command, change it to taking your commands. Then find where Crafty writes result, change it to giving the results to your app.

[kinderchocolate]

May I suggest Arasan with its MIT licence?

Matthew:out

Yes, Arasan would be a good choice. Jon Dart had changed from GPL to MIT, he wanted someone to use his engine. You can make him happy!