Charly's Column – Stockfish
Charly's Column – Stockfish
In the absence of an IBM supercomputer at his data center in Germany's Lower Rhine region, Charly has to make do with a Linux desktop, Stockfish, and chs in order to follow in the footsteps of chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.
Writer Raymond Chandler called chess "as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency." But that doesn't put us off, does it?
In 1996, the media frenzy was huge when the Deep Blue chess computer developed by IBM beat the reigning world champion Garry Kasparov [1]. However, Deep Blue was also a veritable wall cabinet with power consumption to match. Today there are powerful open source chess engines for the home Linux desktop. One of the most powerful engines goes by the name of Stockfish [2]. It has been in development for more than 10 years and has now reached version 12.
However, Stockfish only provides the artificial chess intelligence. You also need a user interface (i.e., a game board). As a chess aficionado, I decided to use chs, which is written in Python. Chs lets you play against the Stockfish engine in your terminal. First, you need to install Stockfish and the Python installer pip before calling pip
to install chs (Listing 1).
Listing 1
Installing chs
$ sudo apt install stockfish python3-pip $ pip install chs
Then you need to tell chs where to find the Stockfish engine. This involves editing the .local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/chs/engine/stockfish.py
file. The line starting with engine_path
needs to be edited as shown in Listing 2.
Listing 2
Editing stockfish.py
[...] elif 'Linux' in platform.system(): engine_path = '/usr/games/stockfish' [...]
All done. I can now type chs
to start a game. You enter the moves in a line of text. The letter indicates which figure you want to move:
- N = Knight
- R = Rook
- Q = Queen
- K = King
- B = Bishop
By the way, the word rook originally comes from Persian, where "rukh" means a chariot. There is no letter for the pawn, which is not necessary due to the limited move paths. To move the left white pawn two squares forward, simply enter a4
. For the other chess pieces, you enter the name and the target square. "Rook to c6" is therefore Rc6
.
Chs logs the moves in Portable Game Notation (PGN) [3], which is shown in Figure 1 to the right of the chessboard. Bxc6
means that the white bishop has been moved to c6; the x
indicates that it has taken an opponent's piece.
Chs doesn't have a stop clock, but no worries. The way I play follows a saying by the German writer Otto Galo. In comparing politics to chess, Galo said it's hard to make the best moves under pressure.
Infos
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Fedora Asahi 40 Remix Available for Macs with Apple Silicon
If you've been anticipating KDE's Plasma 6 for your Apple Silicon-powered Mac, then you're in luck.
-
Red Hat Adds New Deployment Option for Enterprise Linux Platforms
Red Hat has re-imagined enterprise Linux for an AI future with Image Mode.
-
OSJH and LPI Release 2024 Open Source Pros Job Survey Results
See what open source professionals look for in a new role.
-
Proton 9.0-1 Released to Improve Gaming with Steam
The latest release of Proton 9 adds several improvements and fixes an issue that has been problematic for Linux users.
-
So Long Neofetch and Thanks for the Info
Today is a day that every Linux user who enjoys bragging about their system(s) will mourn, as Neofetch has come to an end.
-
Ubuntu 24.04 Comes with a “Flaw"
If you're thinking you might want to upgrade from your current Ubuntu release to the latest, there's something you might want to consider before doing so.
-
Canonical Releases Ubuntu 24.04
After a brief pause because of the XZ vulnerability, Ubuntu 24.04 is now available for install.
-
Linux Servers Targeted by Akira Ransomware
A group of bad actors who have already extorted $42 million have their sights set on the Linux platform.
-
TUXEDO Computers Unveils Linux Laptop Featuring AMD Ryzen CPU
This latest release is the first laptop to include the new CPU from Ryzen and Linux preinstalled.
-
XZ Gets the All-Clear
The back door xz vulnerability has been officially reverted for Fedora 40 and versions 38 and 39 were never affected.