Slow Chess Blitz, a free chess
program |
Main Help
Internet
Options
Using as a Winboard/UCI engine
Moving Pieces: If it's your turn and you click on one of your pieces, it will be selected, and a white box appears around it. Then just click where you want to move it. Castling is done by clicking the king, then the square where he would end up after castling. En Passant captures are performed by clicking the pawn and then its destination square.
Side Window
Move button: Tells the
computer to stop thinking and play the best move its found so far if
it's thinking, otherwise it will tell the computer to start playing
as the side to move.
Analysis button: Start infinite
analysis, see Analysis heading for details.
Book button:
Highlight on the board all the moves in the Slow chess book from this
position.
Retract button: will take back the players last
move so that he can make a different one.
< and > : will
move a half a move backward/forward respectively.
<| and |>
:will go to the first and last move of the game.
Clicking on
the transcript will set the board to the move clicked
on.
Search Options:
The Difficulty
level uses all limits set. Use 'user-defined level' to set these
limits. (Let's say it's set to 7 ply, 5 seconds. If it completes a 7
ply search before 5 seconds it will stop, otherwise it will stop
after 5 seconds no matter how far it has searched.) The 28 ply is
meant to be used for time based games, since it will always (except
certain endgame situations) reach the time limit before it reaches 28
ply.
Seconds per move defaults to 0, and when it's set
to zero the computer uses the time control to choose how long to
think about its next move, instead of thinking a set amount of time
per move.
Ponder Next Move: When checked, the computer
will continue to think about its next move even when its your turn.
When unchecked, the computer will only think on its turn.
Personality: You can alter the playing style by
using Menu->Search Options->Personality. The default
personality uses symmetric evaluation for black and white and is
therefore best for analysis, other personalities use asymmetric
evaluation (eg. Aggressive values king safety less for its own side
than for the opponent's side.)
Displayed Search Info:
When the computer is thinking, it will display info about the search
unless this option is unchecked. It will display the furthest depth
to which it searched a move completely (with a * afterwards if not
all moves were searched to that depth, a * after the eval value means
there's no value for this move at the current depth), the number of
nodes it searched, and search speed in Kilonodes/sec, and the
evaluation value of the best move.
(e2-e4)1.5/20 means
there are 20 legal moves, and Slow is currently searching the 1st of
these (e4) and is searching the 5th of the opponent's responses after
e4.
Analysis: To start analysis of the
position currently on the board, click the "Analyze" button
in the side window. A window will appear below the board which will
display the principle variation of the best move or best moves found.
Positive scores are good for white, negative good for black. If you
don't mind much slower best move analysis, you can use the '+' and
'-' button to have the computer calculate the 2nd best - 6th best
moves in addition to the best. You can also turn on the analysis
window while playing against the computer from the options menu.
Edit Menu: Slow Chess supports PGN and FEN,
popular formats complete games and single positions.
Copy
Position copies the position on the board to a text FEN string on the
Windows clipboard.
Paste Position will set the position from a FEN
string.
Copy/Paste Transcript converts the current game to/from
PGN strings on the clipboard.
Copy/Paste Game State are there so
you can copy the game state, explore a variation, then paste to get
back to the old game state.
Time: The large
print top clock is the time left for a player to complete his move
(according to the time limit set on the menu.) The bottom is the
total time the player has taken to make his moves so far. Use
Menu->Time Control>Set Time Control to set the time limit. It
will be used for both players, computer or human, although humans are
free to ignore it. If the time left runs out, you would lose the game
by the rules of chess, but here your clock just stays at zero and
you're free to continue to play. Time is reset anytime you select
"Menu->Game Actions->New Game", or "Menu->Time
Control->Reset Clock"
In the window beneath a player's time, 1R, 2p beneath black's time
would mean that black has 1 more rook than white, and 2 more
pawns.
Hash Size: Most chess programs store a
table of positions from the search in a "hash table" to
speed up the search. Use Menu->Hash to set this size. The limit
set will be used for games in the Slow GUI and those in Winboard. You
can use the "Menu->Hash->Clear Hash" to clear this
table (mainly for resetting state for test positions, etc.)
Endgame Bitbases: Bitbases must be in the same directory as the .exe to be used. If they are not present they will be ignored. The bitbases contain information on whether certain endings are won/drawn/lost. For instance the KPK.sbb comes with the .exe and tells whether the side with the pawn has a won game or not, and is quite small at about 15kb. (Older Slowchess versions use an incompatible 24kb version.) Other bitbases are available as a download from the web page. The KPPKP.sbb only contains information where opposing pawns are locked, but the rest contain all information needed for endings with those pieces. To test if the extra bitbases are working, here's a position where Slow should instantly show a draw score: 8/8/p6p/P6k/8/5K2/8/8 w - -
Note on the opening book: You manually add or remove positions from the opening book with the 3 and 6 keys. (Also 1 or 2 keys = position preferred by black. 4 or 5 keys = position preferred by white.) Remember to Save the book when you're done, it never auto-saves. You can also add .pgns to the book. If you load an opening book the positions will be added to whatever is in the book in memory. Slow Chess can't handle really large books.
(Note: I of course don't presume that the internet play is
bug-free, but I have tested it, so it seems to work okay for me so
far.)
Make sure you both have the same version of Slow Chess,
preferably the version on this page. If you are not familiar with
computer networking/internet connections, you may have to brush up on
this elsewhere to get this option to work for you. As this subject
varies with your individual hardware&software, all issues are not
explained here.
One player selects "Start Server" from the internet
menu. This will start a Slow Chess server that will listen(wait) for
connections. Whoever starts the server will be automatically
connected as a client (player.)
Once a server is running, to
connect to the server to play other clients, choose "Connect"
from the internet menu, and type the ip of server in the pop-up and
hit connect.
Up to 32 clients may be connected, but I haven't
tested it with more than 4 or 5 people.
Slow Chess
uses port 14324. If you are behind a router/firewall, and want
to have someone connect from the outside internet, you may have to
open this port and direct it to the computer that is running the Slow
Chess server. Also you will need to give the external ip for people
to connect to.
Commands are provided through the Game Actions menu and the Internet menu.
Using Slow Chess as a Winboard Engine: (Skip this part unless you have Winboard and want Slow Chess to use it instead of its own GUI)
Slow.exe can be used as a winboard engine the same way as any other. Slow Chess only supports protocol #2, it doesn't support older winboard versions. Versions 2.93a and later also support UCI. Because it makes things much simpler for me to have only 1 .exe to update, I don't have a separate console winboard version. The only thing I've noticed because of this is there's an hourglass next to the cursor upon startup for a few seconds. Also note that Slow Chess saves its games under winboard as winboardgames.pgn in whatever directory it is run from. I just wanted to keep all the games it played, you can delete this file any time you want. For those who like to know the country of their winboard engines, Slow Chess' official country of origin is the United States.
I've mainly tested Slow Chess computer versus computer matches in the winboard GUI, over the past year version 2.89b to the latest have played over 1000 blitz/bullet games on my computers without problems (no crashes, or time losses when time control had an increment.) This doesn't mean there aren't bugs, but it has run fine for me. Other GUIs are not as well tested.
You can freely get these winboard compatible GUIs. Winboard homepage, Arena homepage.
The Fritz GUI has some issues when running UCI engines.
Delayed/slow analysis: When using create UCI
engine, you can check the Slow UCI option "low priority."
The Fritz GUI requires engines to run at lower priority, or it may
delay displaying thinking lines until well after they're received.
Its method of changing engine priority doesn't work on Multi-threaded
engines like Slow Chess. As long as no other programs are running it
will only be a couple percent slower than in other GUIs, and Fritz
will display the thinking lines when it receives them.
Note that
the lower priority makes engines more susceptible to other running
processes taking up most of the CPU for a move and causing blunders.
Other Issues: Ending an engine name with a "."
could cause an error in the Fritz GUI, so the name of Slow Chess
Blitz no longer ends with a '.'
The Fritz GUI sometimes tells UCI
engines to use 1 MB of hash for no reason, this command is ignored by
Slow Chess, but could cause the hash size not to change to the set
size.