11.10
Recently I’ve been exploring chess options for Ubuntu. The default GNOME Chess application is reasonably nice. It uses the GNU Chess engine by default. However there are other options. The repositories actually have several engines:
- Crafty
- Fruit
- Sjeng (also used by Mac OS X Chess)
The Crafty engine is probably the strongest of the lot. Especially if you install the crafty-books-medium package, which beefs up Crafty’s play. Even then, crafty only uses a single processor to calculate it’s moves. If you have a modern dual core processor, you can enable multithreading by editing the /etc/crafty.rc file like so:
hash=12M
hashp=3M
show book
egtb=0
mt=2
exit
Make sure the mt value equals the number of processors times the cores (of each processor). So if you have 2 processors with 4 cores each, mt should be 8. A more down to earth value would be 1, as most modern computers have a single processor with two cores (1×2).
