UCI engine support for Android

[abik]

In Chess for Android, I currently use a built-in engine, basically a simplified Java port of the C++ engine BikJump. However, it makes sense to add UCI support in the GUI as well, which will enable importing any UCI engine that has been compiled "natively" for Android using the Android NDK. Therefore, I have been prototyping UCI support in Chess for Android. Some initial results of importing a natively compiled UCI engine as a "kibitzer" can be found on my blog (http://aartbik.blogspot.com/). For now, I am testing a natively compiled BikJumpv1.8, but feel free to send me other UCI engines compiled for Android if you want to expose those to early testing.

[abik]

I now present the UCI engine in a slightly better format. Also I compiled BikJump v2.1 natively for Android, which is a multi-threaded bitboard-based engine that also supports the Nalimov endgame tablebases (with kind permission from Eugene Nalimov and Andrew Kadatch). To verify that the probing code works on Android, I copied a few tablebases into the phone's memory and started the engine analysis. As can be seen below, this works well.

[abik]

Here is an UCI engine running on a Nexus One in Chess for Android, probing the complete 3- and 4-piece Nalimov endgame tablebases from SD card.

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