a Java based chess engine
chess4j is a chess program written using Java technologies. It is not meant to be super competitive, but just a test bed of sorts for various interests. Those interests include experimenting with different JVM based languages, parallel and distributed computing, and machine learning.
You can read more about chess4j at http://www.jamesswafford.com/chess4j/ .
To play chess4j, you'll need a Java8 JRE and Winboard or Xboard.
To see if you have a JRE installed, open a command prompt and type 'java -version'. If you need to download a JRE you can download one from the Oracle website:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jre8-downloads-2133155.html
See http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard for details on installing Winboard or Xboard.
Once those prerequisites are met you can download the latest release from http://www.jamesswafford.com/chess4j/ , and extract the zipfile. Once you extract the zipfile, open the 'chess4j.bat' file and modify the path to match the location you just unzipped to.
To build chess4j, you'll need a Java 8 SDK and Maven.
If you have the proper build tools, just clone the repository and do:
mvn clean install
chess4j has a small opening book but it is not enabled by default. If you would like to enable the opening book, you can do it with a command line parameter:
-book=book.db
Normally you wouldn't need to worry about memory usage, but if you want to tweak chess4j here is some important information.
chess4j currently employs three transposition tables. Two are used in the main search (with different replacement strategies), and one in the pawn evaluation.
You can specify the maximum memory allocated to each table via command line parameters, but you would really only want to do this if you were running the program directly from the command line, and not using a Winboard compatible GUI or test harness. (I do this when running test suites but that's about it.)
-hash=256 -phash=256
The above arguments would allocate 256 MB to each of the two tables used in the main search, and 256 MB to the pawn hash table, for a total of 256 MB * 3 = 768 MB.
Winboard / XBoard has an option to specify the maximum memory usage, and chess4j does respect that. The allocation strategy is to give each of the three tables equal share.
You can run EPD formatted test suites with chess4j using the 'suite' command line argument. The default time per problem is 5 seconds, but that can also be changed with the 'time' argument.
java -jar chess4j-3.4-uber.jar -suite=wac.epd -time=10
The command above would start chess4j to process the Win At Chess (WAC) test suite, giving it 10 seconds per problem. (A few test suites can be found in the test/resources folder.)