New Android UCI engine: Ethereal r745

Ethereal is an engine under regular development progress by Andrew Grant. According to its author, who hopefully started to compile for Android too starting from this release, Ethereal is capable of beating MicroMax and TSCP, which means it may reach 2000 ELO in Rapidroid.

Below remarks are taken from the author's description:

"Ethereal is a UCI compliant chess engine which uses a BitBoard board representation and an alpha beta pruning framework. Additionally, the engine uses the follow improvements to pruning, move ordering, and other time saving methods; Null move pruning, Razoring at pre-frontier and frontier nodes, Delta pruning in the quiescence search, Late move reductions in the main alpha beta algorithm, Null windows for principle variation searches, a transposition table, and finally, a killer move heuristic. This engine was originally developed to give myself a worthy opponent, but has since become a worthy opponent for other chess engines. This engine can compete with various engines in the lower rankings of the CCLR tier lists. Some of those results are noted at the bottom of this readme."

I'm planning to test Ethereal as soon as possible and add it to the ranking in next release, in case it works without problems.

Download Ethereal arm5 for Android: HERE

New Android XB engine: Minimardi 1.3 AB

In fact, it's not new at all. Minimardi used to be included in Aart Bik's early engine packages dated June-2013 !!!

Since i should have been mistaken about the protocol it uses, i had marked it disqualified because it could never be imported as a UCI engine.

Thanks to the user comments coming to blog, i recently woke up and tried again using XB protocol. And voila! It works perfectly on Exynos and Rockchip with 900+1 time control.

Minimardi is written by Juan Pablo Fernandez and the Android port will probably be very useful as a trustable build around 1500 ELO. I've already included it in Rapidroid.

Download and enjoy an engine you can beat yourself as human, very rare these days: HERE

Another version of Minimardi packed with a GUI is also available HERE on Google Play. However, the engine included seems to be v1.1, an earlier version. I never tried that one, so i don't know about it but in case it's a Java port and not a native code, it should perform much weaker than the XB engine.

Android UCI engine update: Stockfish dev't 2016.06.12

This is a build taken from Stockfish forum chat. I don't know who has done it but once loaded the ID showed 120616 which i assume to be correct. It seems the source is very recent but keep in mind that generating a good Android build needs many tricks and take the unknown with some caution.

Shortly said, i don't have enough info to guarantee that this mysterious build delivers more power than Peter Österlund's latest release. It's made for arm7 32-bit and may not work on Lollipop and Marshmallow. Try and see for yourself: HERE

New (?) Android UCI engine: APIL Chess 1.06

When i decided to get back to digging Jim Ablett's oldest builds, still hosted in Kyrill Kurikov's repository, i had very little hope of discovering anything unseen before. Well, a long time ago i'd navigated very deep all these folders and i should have collected anything available already.

But you never know. The hunt for the hidden treasures didn't yield a null result: 3 old builds to try should be better than nothing.

Out of three new engines found there, only one seemed to bu usable so far: Apil Chess 1.06. Two others, Cyrano and Sissa (another build was tested years ago without success) have failed to play engine games despite my efforts. They can be imported and seem to work but they exit suddenly during all games.

Regarding Apil Chess, it can barely play games but most of them require "post adjudications" due to frequent terminations before checkmate. 

In fact, below description of the engine is highly attractive at Chessprogramming Wiki:

"APIL chess (Asynchronous Process Interaction Library chess) is an open source distributed chess program for educational purposes and private use written by Ulf Lorenz and first published in July 2002. APILchess represents the board using a 16x12 mailbox array with 16-bit disjoint piece flag encoding, and piece-lists. There are traces (Hydra.h), that the Asynchronous Process Interaction Library was already used for early Hydra trials."

Reading Hydra between the lines made me excited too. However, the Android build can't play like Hydra, the cluster-monster engine which had beaten GM Michael Adams (ELO 2740) decisively in the last  human vs machine match played at tournament time controls without odds.

Windows build of the v1.05r1b is not different: Only 1464 ELO in CCRL 40/4.

After some 20 games vs Chess for Android native engine and Zzzzz, the Android build seems to play around 1400 ELO so far at shorter time controls.

I can't yet dare to introduce Apil into Rapidroid because of the adjudications which will probably bother me very much. We'll see.

For those who enjoy beating computers at chess, Apil 0.6 can be downloaded: HERE

Komodo 8 FREE for Android

Komodo team continues to convert old commercial versions to free status following each new release. Hats off for such good habit.

Now that Komodo 10 is released for Windows (unfortunately not yet for Android), Komodo 8 package becomes free for all. Yummy enough!

Since the said package comes with a bundled Android compile, you can have Komodo 8 running on your device for free. Yes, that's true.

To be sure, i've uninstalled my purchased copy of K8 on one of my devices, disconnected from Internet and installed the binary included in the zip package. After importing it into Chess for Android, the message "Licenced to Komodochess" along with the UCI options dialog boxes showed up.

Unlike the commercial version still available on Google Play, the bundled version has no OEX compatibility and you must install it on each GUI separately.

Everything is fine until here but i must notify the interested users about the bad news too: The bundled version is not as fast as the purchased version. It will reach lower nodes per seconds and it will play probably 15-20 ELO weaker.

Although anything free tastes better than the paid one, my recommendation stays the same: You'd better prefer the GooglePlay version of Komodo 9.42 or wait for Komodo 10 Android.

If you absolutely don't wanna pay: HERE is the link to the K8 package.

For the moment, i prefer not to create a mirror copy as their site will probably keep the package available for download during centuries!

Droidfish 1.61 with Stockfish 2016.05.28

In reply to a question asked in Talkchess forum, Peter Österlund shared recently a link to the development version of his wonderful GUI Droidfish. Actually i don't know much about what GUI improvements are featured but i guess most fans will rather appreciate the presence of the newest development version of Stockfish in this version.

I will soon share the engine compiles separately. However, if you already have Droidfish installed you may prefer to update it to the development version and upgrade Stockfish to the most recent build available for Android on-the-fly.

Meanwhile, this Stockfish build is supposed to be the strongest chess engine ever that you can run on your Android device. Now, enjoy the beast packed within Droidfish: HERE

Android UCI engine update: Stockfish dev't 2016.05.28

After three months Jim Ablett had compiled a development version of Stockfish, a new version is available thanks to Peter Österlund, the author of Droidfish GUI.

Since i've already posted about Droidfish release, the purpose of this post is the Stockfish engine which comes bundled in it.

The builds are dated 28th of May and they are probably the strongest Android builds you can install on your devices. Even though i can't be 100% sure about this without playing test gauntlets, i can rely on the common positive feedback coming from the computer chess community.

I've prepared two files with the builds taken from Droidfish, depending on the main architecture:

Stockfish 2016.05.28 for arm: HERE

Stockfish 2016.05.28 for x86: HERE

Bon appetit!