strong (java) chess engines for mobiles

[mclane]

mobiles get faster and faster. and you can "misuse" them for chess.

i do mainly use my mobiles as dedicated chess computers, mp3 player and rarely as telephone.

it seems the programmers have specialized...

genius : symbian os / pocket pc / palm

hiarcs : pocket pc / palm

chess tiger: 68x palms / Risc palms

shredder : many mobiles because java engine

mobile chess (lokasoft) : java chess



as it seems all mobiles that are NOT palm OS, not Symbian and
not windows pocket PCs can only use shredder as java engine
for chess.

or are there any other STRONG serious java chess engines for mobiles?

with serious i mean: it should have info alike
search depth, evals, main line, NPS

it should have serious time controls and analysis mode too.

[Tord Romstad]

Hi Thorsten!

mobiles get faster and faster. and you can "misuse" them for chess.

Yes, this is the perfect time for playing chess against mobile phones and other handheld units. A couple of years ago, they were too slow and weak to play well, and in a couple of more years, they will be so fast and strong that it is no longer fun.

i do mainly use my mobiles as dedicated chess computers, mp3 player and rarely as telephone.

it seems the programmers have specialized...

genius : symbian os / pocket pc / palm

And the iPhone!

hiarcs : pocket pc / palm

chess tiger: 68x palms / Risc palms

shredder : many mobiles because java engine

mobile chess (lokasoft) : java chess

As a shameless plug, I'll add one entry to your list:

Glaurung: iPhone OS

as it seems all mobiles that are NOT palm OS, not Symbian and
not windows pocket PCs can only use shredder as java engine
for chess.

or are there any other STRONG serious java chess engines for mobiles?

Not that I'm aware of. There doesn't seem to be much point in doing it at the moment. On real computers, using Java makes sense, because the CPUs are so ridiculously fast that your program will be virtually unbeatable no matter what you do, but on handheld devices, Java is still too slow for good performance. And because almost all of us already have an engine in C or C++, and these programming languages to compile our engines for all sorts of platforms, there is just no incentive to rewrite in Java.

with serious i mean: it should have info alike
search depth, evals, main line, NPS

it should have serious time controls and analysis mode too.

Glaurung has all of these, except NPS. Nobody has requested it so far. What do you need NPS for? I'd prefer not to add it, because it will make the analysis output more cluttered, and take up valuable space on the screen.

Tord

[Dann Corbit]

mobiles get faster and faster. and you can "misuse" them for chess.

i do mainly use my mobiles as dedicated chess computers, mp3 player and rarely as telephone.

it seems the programmers have specialized...

genius : symbian os / pocket pc / palm

Genius is not written in Java

hiarcs : pocket pc / palm

Hiarcs is not written in Java

chess tiger: 68x palms / Risc palms

Chess Tiger is not written in Java

shredder : many mobiles because java engine

Shredder is not written in Java

mobile chess (lokasoft) : java chess

This one sounds like it is written in Java. I guess that all of the above can pound the stuffings out of it.

as it seems all mobiles that are NOT palm OS, not Symbian and
not windows pocket PCs can only use shredder as java engine
for chess.

or are there any other STRONG serious java chess engines for mobiles?

with serious i mean: it should have info alike
search depth, evals, main line, NPS

it should have serious time controls and analysis mode too.

The Java runtime is so huge is seems a *very* strange choice for mobile phones. I guess that if mobile phones come with Java already, then it is not a totally insane choice. But still sub-optimal for chess.

[Tord Romstad]

mobiles get faster and faster. and you can "misuse" them for chess.

i do mainly use my mobiles as dedicated chess computers, mp3 player and rarely as telephone.

it seems the programmers have specialized...

genius : symbian os / pocket pc / palm

Genius is not written in Java

Hi Dann,

I think you misunderstand: That's exactly what Thorsten said. He mentioned all these programs as non-Java programs.

Tord

[mclane]

IMO shredder and mobile chess are java.
Mobile chess from lokasoft is nice, but has only 3 playing levels and is not showing mainline or evals or search depth DURING search. it only shows them after computation.


maybe other chess enthusiasts do know more strong engines...

my mobile is a motorola rokr z6. i think this is 490 mhz.

so far i am using the following mobiles for chess:


nokia 3650 (104 mhz, symbian os = genius)
qtek 9090 (400 mhz, hiarcs, genius, openchess[fruit, toga], naum)
palm tungsten t3 (400 mhz, hiarcs, genius, naum, chesstiger)

and

motorola rokr z6 (490 mhz)

[CThinker]

Even on desktop computers, there are very few engines written in Java. Of those very few, there is almost none that one could call 'strong' (that is, at least at the level of the Fruit/Glaurung/Scorpio).

Now, you take those few Java engines and port them to the ARM processor, and you get a bunch of really weak engines. Even with Jazelle, the performance increase of Java apps on ARM is not dramatic.

As for the trend, mobile devices are not getting faster. Instead, they just get more and more energy efficient. I have yet to find a new PDA or SmartPhone that is faster than my 5-year-old iPaq 2755.

[Arsha Mahdavi]

I haven’t seen any strong chess program for Java MIDP devices. Programs I tried: ‘Mobile Chess’, ‘Shredder’ and ‘Chess by cellufun’; but they were very weak and from what I have tried any sane program runs on 68K can easily beat them. Probably there exists some others stronger, but I‘m not aware of them.

Now this is the question: What is the name of the strongest chess program for Java MIDP devices?
(I am really interested and eager to find out the answer!)

[mclane]

so there is maybe a market for strong java chess engines.

as it seems none of the old programmers is interested in doing a stronger java engine because someone could look into the secrets used in the engine, maybe one should use an open source program that IS known and no secrets could be revealed and it should be ported to java.

[swami]

I haven’t seen any strong chess program for Java MIDP devices. Programs I tried: ‘Mobile Chess’, ‘Shredder’ and ‘Chess by cellufun’; but they were very weak and from what I have tried any sane program runs on 68K can easily beat them. Probably there exists some others stronger, but I‘m not aware of them.

Now this is the question: What is the name of the strongest chess program for Java MIDP devices?
(I am really interested and eager to find out the answer!)

Chess Genius is still the leader.

[mclane]

genius only runs on palm, symbian and windows pocket pcs, right ?
or is there a java version too ?