Hi David, This is a good place to ask about GNU Chess. I can give you some information and hopefully answer your questions to some extent.
GNU Chess is a program to play chess against the computer, or to let the computer play against itself. It includes a frontend for interactive playing, or it can be used as a chess engine from third-party frontends. Its built-in good old frontend is purely textual. It also includes an enhanced frontend that we can call graphical or pseudo-graphical, based on Unicode chess points. This is good for usage from a terminal. When used as a chess engine, a typical partner is XBoard, a fully-fledged graphical frontend, and it can be used from many others. GNU Chess runs on GNU/Linux, Unix and Mac OS X, but not on Windows, at least not the official version. I have heard of variants that can, but I don't have any information about them. Its chess engine is quite powerful, based on Fruit 2.1. The program can use a book, especially for openings, but this is optional, so you can easily disable it. It does not include end-game knowledge. Of course, the chess engine includes an evaluation function. It is recognizable, but it is not a plug-in that you can change without rebuilding the whole program. The evaluation function, though not trivial, is relatively simple, and it does not account only by itself for such a strong engine, which also comes from the search algorithms. You can modify the program as long as you can write C. Technically speaking, it is C++, but it is "virtually" C code. BTW, I personally started a modification of the program some years ago in a way that could be interesting for your purposes, but unfortunately I did not finish it: a running mode based on an "external" evaluation function written in the Scheme programming language. If you are interested in it, you can find a start point of this idea in the repository. Whether GNU Chess is what you are looking for or not, I could not say it for certain. That depends on your skills in GNU/Linux, C and chess engines among other factors. Just let me know if I can help you more. Cheers, Antonio On Tue, Nov 5, 2019 at 2:36 PM David Wilson <[email protected]> wrote: > If this is the wrong kind of query to pose this group then I would be > grateful if you could direct me elsewhere - and, should that be the case, > please accept my apologies. > > I am looking for a simple, bare-bones chess-playing program with a > graphical front end that I will be able to adapt to incorporate my own > evaluation function. > > The basic functionality should include, knowledge of legal moves, > tree-searching (pruning etc.) but little else. In particular I do not wish > the program to have knowledge of openings, end games etc. > > My motivation is to explore the game-playing behaviour of a specific, > simple evaluation function. By that, I mean the function that assigns as > score to a given position. This is motivated by my own curiosity. If the > experimental outcome merits it, I might make the modified program and the > results available through a web page or suchlike. > > Naturally I will be happy to conform to the terms of the GPL in any work I > do. > > Do you think Gnu chess might be a good starting point ? > If so, is it possible to access and modify the code under Windows or does > it require Linux ? > > Thanks in advance, > David Wilson > _______________________________________________ > Info-gnu-chess mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu-chess > _______________________________________________ Info-gnu-chess mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu-chess
