How can I test iphone engines?

[Taner Altinsoy]

As the title says I am looking a way to test my iphone chess engines' playing strength. Currently I have iphone versions of shredder, fritz, glarung and Hiarcs. There is no automated process I know of that I can use to test these engines. Therefore I am looking for a program/engine that plays consistently in 2300-2400 elo range on an AMD X2 4200 or intel celeron 1400MHz laptop and playing the moves manually from my iphone and hopefully play enough games that would allow me to evaluate engines. At he moment all the programs claim they are the best engines. I would aprreciate anyone who have such a rating list for iphone chess apps or give ideas on how to test them.

Taner Altinsoy

[Tord Romstad]

As the title says I am looking a way to test my iphone chess engines' playing strength. Currently I have iphone versions of shredder, fritz, glarung and Hiarcs. There is no automated process I know of that I can use to test these engines. Therefore I am looking for a program/engine that plays consistently in 2300-2400 elo range on an AMD X2 4200 or intel celeron 1400MHz laptop and playing the moves manually from my iphone and hopefully play enough games that would allow me to evaluate engines. At he moment all the programs claim they are the best engines. I would aprreciate anyone who have such a rating list for iphone chess apps or give ideas on how to test them.

What I do is to compile just the UCI engine, without any GUI, for the iPhone OS. I copy the engine executable to the home directory of the 'root' user on my iPhone, and create a tiny script file similar to this on my desktop computer:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

ssh root@1.2.3.4 ./stockfish

Substitute the IP address of your device for 1.2.3.4.

This little script can then be used precisely like an ordinary UCI engine on the desktop computer, and can be installed in any UCI compatible GUI. The GUI doesn't even know the engine is running on a remote computer. Using a desktop GUI, I can easily play automated matches against other engines, or run the iPhone engine on a chess server.

[Taner Altinsoy]

Any results? By the way thank you for your reply. I'll try it asap.

[M ANSARI]

Have you had any problem with battery drain using these chess engines? In my Iphone I have the Garmin GPS Rangefinder Golf application and the Chess application and both these applications seem to quickly drain the battery. I am not sure if it is because the application keeps running in the background even after you move away from it, or if it is simply a gas guzzling application.

[Taner Altinsoy]

Well yes battery draining is a problem while playing chess with these apps but as far as I'm aware they dont run in the background unless there is a bug with the program or the OS. I think gps apps drain battery much quicker than any other app. It also makes your phone quite hot.

Taner