Chuck Ronco, a HAE Chess Club volunteer and chess teacher was asked about chess software for the students. Here is his reply on some available options. Thanks to Chuck, Derek, Tom, Brian, James (and other Delts) who volunteer their time for the club each week.
Natwarlal - This uses a standard WinBoard platform, it is easy to install, and in quite strong, approximately 2300 when given plenty of time. Go to
Options and then
Time Control to regulate time settings and therefore relative strength. There are some bugs, especially when cutting and pasting game positions from other programs, otherwise a real workhorse. (The bugs are avoided by hitting
Reset Board before pasting a game or position.) This is the msot commonly used weapon in my 'arsenal' because of its simplicity and strength.
http://www.ironcode.com/chess-game.html
Commonly used programs include Crafty and GNU chess, both are bundled into WinBoard by Tim Mann on his webpage. This all-in-one platform and engine is ready to get online immediately to FICS, the Free Internet Chess Server, where I play everyday. If you are new to FICS, I strongly recommend you try it out.
Babas Chess is very appealing to the visual learner, or to those that like a lot of bells and whistles, it has a lot of frames and command tables, real-time graphs, charts, etc. The real advantage is the Analyze command. This is really cool because you can see where you messed up, and it finds (nearly) everything you (and they) missed! It uses Crafty also, but the above Winboard application cannot analyze as well, nor does it display the results as well. This interface actually goes down the mistaken lines, explaining why the computer thinks a line is good or bad, rather than just saying so. The ratings for Crafty vary, but it is on the order of 2700 ELO.
The most powerful program on the planet for free! Rybka (which means little fish in Russian) needs its own platform to run. You first need Arena as the platform, and then you get the engine to run on it. (There are other platforms available, but Arena is free.) Being so strong is a novelty really, but in some circumstances, it finds solutions and avenues to victory that look like the Hand of God is moving the pieces - truly an awesome powerhouse! I don't use it often, mainly because its analysis is hard to read, and it is very time-consuming. (Sometimes its neat to see what each program finds when analyzing the same game.) HIGHEST KNOWN RATING 3155 !!!!!
Then navigate to the Download the Demo icon on the right of the page, or follow
Both demo versions work well, but installation requires reading the instructions and jumping through five minutes of hoops, but its worth it.
Since you might be new to these programs, *.pgn is the normal format that (I believe) every program saves their games in. Its basically a small text file, *.txt with a different extension. This way you can play a game, say on FICS using Winboard, save the game as Sample.pgn and import it into any of the other programs for analysis. If you aren't interested in saving the whole game, but you want to see what the computer would do in this POSITION, save the position in *.fen format, which is basically the same thing, but does not include all previous moves. (Please note that since the computer doesn't have all of the game data, it may not know if the king has previously moved, and may think it can still castle! But this is rare, and only a worry if the king moved and then moved back into its original square.)
A very comprehensive list of other free engines and platforms is available at:
Also, remember these programs are velociraptors when it comes to eating up a computer's resources, so speeds and strengths vary between systems.
(Thanks, Chuck!)
Pick-up games were common and a nice way to meet new friends!
