28
If the computer was capable of evaluating every line of play right to the end of the game, the evaluation would never change. Indeed, the evaluation of every move would be either "win", "lose" or "draw". This is essentially what happens in endgame tablebases.* If computers could do this for every position, every game against a computer would consist of the ...
27
On ubuntu, you can download Firefox, Chrome, or any other browser of your choice. From within that browser, go to lichess.org, chess.com, or chess24.com, create a free account, and play against others online.
23
It's really hard to tell what a brilliancy is. For example, you might try to say that a brilliancy is a move that's much better than any other move on the board. Well, if you offer me a queen exchange and I play queen takes queen, you taking back my queen is probably a much better move than any alternative, but it's definitely not a brilliancy. So maybe a ...
22
Yes, I think so.
You'd have all possible board positions as states (so lots of states, but finite).
The starting position as an initial state. Legal moves as links between the states (so the "alphabet" would consist of all possible moves). Positions that end the game like checkmate, stalemate and dead positions as accepting states.
In the end you'd get ...
21
2018 update:
It seems lichess.org offers a lot of the features you're looking for. On lichess, go to tools then choose Analysis board:
The editor allows you to import FEN, PGN or edit the board yourself.
You have access to two proper opening databases, one extracted from the games played on lichess and one from the masters games (top players). It's not ...
21
Here's why computer analysis (on any platform) can not find brilliant moves.
They don't exist.
Now, I recognize that this seems very counter-intuitive, but bear with me. This has to do with the difference between how we (intuitively) view a chess game and how a computer (correctly) views a chess game.
When we look at a chess position, we subconsciously ...
20
Finite state machines can be described as the recognizers of regular languages. You could perhaps identify chess with the set of all possible game records. For example f3e5g4Qh4# (the fool's mate) is one of the shorter strings in this language. Since this language has a finite alphabet and all words have bounded length (with the upper bound somewhere in the ...
19
One of the problems with chess-analysis software for weaker players is that it just shows the strongest move per the computer, without any explanation why. There are some programs, like the ChessBase programs that, using their "Tactical Analysis" feature, attempt to give some explanation to the moves, but they are all wanting.
That said, decodechess.com ...
17
Here are my Chess apps for Android:
iChess — lots of chess tactics to solve, all offline. You can also load your own PGN or purchase recent tactics based on openings, or from recent games.
Chess Book Study — a very innovative app that shows a board and an eBook in the same screen. It makes it easy to study chess books. You can even dictate and the moves ...
17
You can use the SVG rendering functionalities of python-chess. This will allow you to create a SVG-formatted visualisation of any board position loaded using python-chess.
FEN to SVG
For example, given a FEN as input (say we save our python script as boardtosvg.py)
Using python3 and the python-chess library version 0.30.1
import chess
import chess.svg
import ...
15
After installing GNU Chess run the command gnuchess from the terminal, it would look something like this:
~$ gnuchess
GNU Chess 5.07
Adjusting HashSize to 1024 slots
Transposition table: Entries=1K Size=48K
Pawn hash table: Entries=0K Size=32K
White (1) : e4
1. e4
black KQkq e3
r n b q k b n r
p p p p p p p p
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . ...
14
This may or may not be your cup of tea, but if you are a LaTeX user, then SCID's LaTeX export feature produces ready-to-compile LaTeX source that yields rather nice (IMO) PDFs quickly and painlessly. There are a few options regarding how/whether comments and variations are to be displayed, and diagrams are automatically included wherever you have inserted a ...
14
Different engines have different "scales" for their numerical evaluations. For instance, in a typical middlegame position with plenty of play left, when Houdini says +2.00 or better, it is highly probable that White has a winning advantage (though even here I've included qualifications for a reason). But consider: one could modify the source code of Houdini ...
14
You are being compared to perfection
Your every move is being evaluated by a chess engine with super-human playing-strength. The default is to compare your performance to its own super-human performance. Since the engine always makes the move it itself has identified as the highest-valued, perforce it always makes the best move by definition. Hence you can ...
13
Original Answer:
7-men Lomonosov is free as an Android application.
Update - September 2018:
7-men Syzygy is available for free. Also available from Lichess.
13
www.chessable.com just launched. This should be exactly what you are looking for. You can import pgns and can train the opening using space repetition.
13
First download StockFish. You click on the button shown in the below image and choose "Save as". It will be saved as .rar file, which you can open with WinRar, 7Zip or similar utility...
Then you unzip it ( put it where you want ). After that run Fritz, and choose Engine -> Create UCI engine like in the picture below:
The following dialog box will pop up, ...
answered Aug 9 '14 at 18:56
AlwaysLearningNewStuff
11.1k2 gold badges23 silver badges53 bronze badges
13
Right at the bottom of the Computer Chess Rating List for the 40/4 time control is Brutus RND, an engine that simply selects random legal moves.
http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/404/cgi/engine_details.cgi?print=Details&each_game=1&eng=Brutus%20RND#Brutus_RND
It has a rating of 205 (as of 6/6/2018). This is not a FIDE rating of course, but it is ...
13
8/3k4/2p5/p2p2p1/P2P2P1/2KB4/8/8 w - - 0 1
In this position the engine gives advantage of around +2.5, but as you can see, this position is a draw as there is no way for white king to enter into Black's side of the board to penetrate any of the black pawns as the black pawns control all the accessible squares which are b4, c4, e4, f4 and h4. Even though ...
13
Tablebases are databases of endgame positions, with few pieces left on the board (say a 5-man tablebase, which consists of all legal positions with 5 pieces on the board in total, including kings, say K+Q vs. K+R+B). These databases have the positions 'connected', i.e. they also contain the moves to get from one legal position to another (in particular, ...
12
I would suggest you look into some open source engines. And tools for analysis. These will be free. Some will be quite fully featured and very very powerful:
Stockfish. Rating: 3121
Critter (free) Rating: 3207
Also, look into SCID: an information database to which you can import millions of games and pair the database with analysis engines, add chess ...
12
I know that I, for one, have used them to tell me why a line not mentioned in the books is bad. Most books show you all viable lines of play and maybe a few dubious ones, but a book can't mention all possible variations. More often than not, my opponent will play something very early on in an opening that isn't mentioned in any of the books I have on hand ...
12
As thb pointed out, you need vectors. I suggest you use a python-chess to generate SVG vector images.
Prerequisites:
Python 2.6+ or 3.3+
Python-chess:
Install form pypi using pip: pip install python-chess[uci,gaviota]
Creating a script
Since you might need to generate multiple SVGs, let's create a script. So, you can use the script to generate multiple ...
12
I happen to be the author of the chessboard editor under discussion. Let me clarify the issue.
This editor is supposed to enforce legal moves but it has a bug which prevents it from being able to make a pawn capture onto the final rank. Therefore it cannot notice that a black chessman controls the f1 square. If you place a black bishop on the a6-f1 diagonal ...
12
may the game of chess be considered a finite state machine?
Yes; this is a good insight.
A FSM is an abstract model of computation with the following characteristics:
The machine begins in a known "start state"
The machine accepts a sequence of inputs
Each input is interpreted in the context of the current state
Each input causes an update to the current ...
11
I agree that installing Windows via Bootcamp is a good course of action. You may also want to consider Hiarcs' Mac Chess Explorer:
http://www.hiarcs.com/mac-chess-explorer.htm
It has many of the same functions as ChessBase, and is from a developer who has an excellent history of supporting his Mac products. The program works with .pgn files, so being able ...
11
As of 2017.04.01, pgn-extract (version 17-38) does provide variation splitting functionality via its --splitvariants flag. So, if you want this in a Windows/Linux/Mac OS environment it is available. Disclosure: I am the author of pgn-extract.
11
Programs like ChessBase, ChessPad, Scid vs. PC, and Lucas Chess all let you highlight squares & draw arrows on the board. You can then just record what you're doing using regular screen recording software like the excellent oCam.
Edit: I've created a video showing how to use Lucas Chess to create instructional chess videos. View it here. (YouTube)
11
There're only two protocols - UCI and Winboard. Winboard is an old protocol and not really being used nowadays. Crafty is the only major engine still supporting the Winboard protocol, but it's only because the engine is also very old. UCI is a newer protocol developed by Shredder, and is used everywhere - Windows, Macs, Linux, Android, iOS etc. UCI is really ...
10
What about GNU Chess? It has a plain terminal interface but supports visual interfaces such as XBoard.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
