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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.
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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 ...
21
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 ...
19
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 ...
19
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 ...
18
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 ...
16
The Chessmaster series.
IGN said that the series has always distinguished itself with first-rate chess teaching tools and this is the best selling chess franchise in the world. It virtually has no rival in chess teaching software, at least as far as my research goes. Chessmaster doesn't have the best chess engine though, so if you plan on playing ...
16
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 ...
15
I highly recommend Scid ("Shane's Chess Information Database"). Here's a screenshot of the Mac version (more to be found at Softpedia):
It is completely free, has lots of functionality, and is fast (handles my 5.2M game database quickly and fluidly). I have only used Scid in its linux and windows versions, not the Mac. But from what I understand there are ...
15
Here are my Chess apps for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Asim+Pereira
iChess - lots of chess tactics to solve, all offline. Can also load your pgn or purchase recent tactics based on openings or from 2013 games.
Chess Book Study - a very innovative app that shows a board and an eBook in the same screen. Makes it easy to study ...
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 ...
13
Arena Chess
Arena is a free chess application that has a rich and stable feature set. It should do pretty much all you need to do - except generate PDFs (not sure what you mean by that)
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
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, ...
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
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 ...
12
Chessbase will do what you're describing (enter the game, then tell it to annotate), but it is not free.
Scid is a free alternative database program, but it will not automatically annotate your game.
See here for more discussion: http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/is-there-any-free-software-to-analyse-the-completed-game
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
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 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 ...
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.
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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.
11
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 ...
11
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 ...
10
I know Chessmaster does this (see Ubisoft's list of controls for Chessmaster X), since I've used Chessmaster X. In certain (i.e. non-competitive) game modes, Ctrl-F will force the computer to move during its turn. It isn't a free program, but it has a lot of good resources for a beginner which IMO make it worth it.
Edit: It looks as if I have misread the ...
10
What about GNU Chess? It has a plain terminal interface but supports visual interfaces such as XBoard.
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From wikipedia:
There is software for playing Tri-D Chess; Parmen is a Windows application written by Doug Keenan and available free on his website.
Here are some of the external links for (software) Raumschach and Tri-D chess:
http://www.pathguy.com/chess/Chess3D.htm
http://www.cosmicchess.com/
http://www.parmen.com/
There is a version ...
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