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).
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
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
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.