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Dear all,

I am new to the world of chess programming. a hobby I took on for 3 reasons: (i) I have always enjoyed watching chess, (ii) to learn C++ and (iii) because I find the mathematical methods used fascinating (tree searches, neural networks, etc.).

I have spent quite some effort to learn from BlueFever Software and his engine Vice (http://bluefever.net/Downloads/ViceReadMe.html). This resource was in fact invaluable to my learning of both C++ and chess programming and I can't thank him enough for providing people like me with such material.

I am now starting from an engine similar to Vice (massively copied to be frank), I am looking forward to developing some improvements and quantify the progress made. As such, I would need to find sparing partners to test against. My set up is very basic. I have a few i5 Linux laptops with cutechess-cli installed on them. I have tried to find chess engines at all levels but ended up being unable to install most of them: either they are just provided in the form of a windows executable, or the makefile doesn't work (by either trying to fetch a file that doesn't exist or other issue that seems unfixable at my end).

So far, I have the following list of sparring partners with their Elo taken from CCRL (40/4 most of the time but I might have taken it from other sources):
-Stockfish 8 3496
-Alfil 12MT 3137 (Elo for v. 15.7)
-Crafty 25.2 3056
-Spike 1.2 3017 (Elo for v. 1.4)
-Demolito 20190106 2980 (Elo for v. 20181029)
-Gaviota 1.0 2941
-Glaurung 2.2 2914
-Fruit 2.3.1 2782
-Pawny 1.2 2767
-Arminius 20170101 2721 (Elo for v. 20181223)
-K2 0.87 2617 (Elo for v. 0.91)
-Hermann 2.7.1 2532 (Elo for v. 2.8)
-AICE 0.9.22 2338
-BikJump 2.01 2104
-Vice 1.1 2042 (Elo for v. 1.0)
-Heracles 0.6.16 1920
-TSCP 1.81b 1714
-Hippocampe 0.4.2 868 (Elo for v. 0.4.1)

As you can see, there is a big gap between Elo 2000 and ELo 2700 which is where my initial improvements will lie.

Do you have any suggestion of Linux friendly engine that I could download and use as sparring partners an

Thank you in advance,

V.

Hey Volodya,

my engine Asymptote falls within that rating range. You can find the releases at https://github.com/malu/asymptote/releases.

It's not C/++ but Rust. But I do provide binaries of the releases. The release file naming before v0.4.2 might be a bit confusing: "-popcount" means no popcount and "+popcount" means popcount. Since v0.4.2 "-popcount" means popcount, otherwise no popcount.

The CCRL 40/4 ratings of each version are:

• v0.4.2: tbd
• v0.3: 2484
• v0.2.0: 2314
• v0.1.8: 2173

If you experience any problems with using Asymptote let me know.

Volodya wrote: ↑Wed Jan 23, 2019 4:39 pmAs you can see, there is a big gap between Elo 2000 and ELo 2700 which is where my initial improvements will lie.

Do you have any suggestion of Linux friendly engine

The UCI version of the CT800 can be an option, see my signature. Current V1.33 is listed with 2275 Elo at CCRL 40/4, but you can also throttle the engine via UCI commands. It's written in C99, licenced under GPL, runs also under Linux, and there is a build script for Linux under source/application-uci/make_ct800_pc_x64.sh . GCC is required, no pre-made Linux binary supplied. A small opening book is compiled right into the engine.

My programs run under Linux (better than under Windows in fact):
- Dumb 1.0 to 1.3 about 2200 Elo (CCRL 40/4 scale)
- Amoeba 1.0 to 2.8: about 2600 to 3000 Elo on CCRL 40/4
Have fun with them.

Weini is 2200
Minic is 2400

Vajolet is 3050 and you can download source and linux executable from github

Jazz and SjaakII should be in that range. You should probably also grab FairyMax (or microMax, I suppose it doesn’t really matter if you’re only interested in normal chess).

Might I suggest though that you use something like Stockfish or Komodo at time odds? You want to spend. CPU time on your program, afterall.

My engine GearHeart is around the strength of TSCP. It's supposed to be a reference implementation of a chess engine, with most of the same features as Vice, but written in a C++ style. It should build on linux, but you'll need boost and sparsehash libs (you should be able to apt-get them).

Arasan is on Linux (3080 on the CCRL 40/40 list)

--Jon

Winter is developed in C++ on Linux and relies only on the standard template library. There is a nice progression curve from 2450 to roughly 2800 over the course of the versions from 0.1 to 0.4.
I never released any Linux binaries, but it should compile on any 64bit system by calling either "make" or "make no_bmi", depending on whether or not your processor supports the BMI2 instruction set.

https://github.com/rosenthj/Winter/releases