Monday, March 31, 2014

Play against the Computer...this is MindTheCheck!

MindTheCheck has a strong chess engine among its users and now you can play chess with it! The engine is the famous Sockfish, one of the strongest ever.

Why Stockfish? Here are the reasons:

  • it's open source;
  • it supports UCI protocol;
  • it has several skill levels.


UCI protocol makes the SW integration easy so a number of engines are based on this protocol (e.g. Shredder).
However, the free Shredder version (1.5) does not permit to change the skill level while Stockfish does, futhermore Stockfish has 20 different skill levels.

Is MindTheCheck equipped with a dedicated server for the chess engine?
No, it isn't. Instead there are several clients acting as an engine. The "Computer" is a MindTheCheck's user which connects to the website and stays available to play as long as it gets disconnected.
Clients balance the load: each engine instance will play one or more games at the same time. When a client disconnects, another client with less load at that moment will take over.

Playing is easy and quick, if you can't find any human opponent online, you will train yourself with the computer now.