Antonius

This directory contains the "antonius" chess engine. It is named after the knight, of questionable chess-playing strength, in an Ingmar Bergman movie.

Requirements

A Gnu/Linux environment.
An installation of Erlang (http://erlang.org). The installed executables (erl, erlc, etc) must be in the path.
A C compiler, such as gcc.
Optionally: The "xboard" GUI.
Optionally: Eclipse with ErlIDE for browsing/editing the source.

Playing a console game

Type

make game-cli

and follow instructions on the screen.

Playing an xboard game

It is assumed that you have installed 'xboard' (http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard/). Type

make game-xboard

A chessboard window should appear, and a console window where some debug output is shown. Play by drag-and-drop.

Running the tests

The provided test suites are expected to pass. Some of the tests check various aspects of correctness and should always succeed. Other tests depend on the evaluation function and may have to be adjusted if the evaluation function is changed.

To run the tests, type

make test-quick
make test-long

Allow several minutes for the tests to complete on a dual-core or better host.

Running the dialyzer

Type

make dialyze

Allow a couple of minutes for the var/dialyze_plt file to be built when this command is run for the first time. A "passed successfully" message should result.

Using Eclipse

Two Eclipse projects are provided: 'antonius' (the Erlang source) and code_nif (functions coded in C).

For the 'antonius' project Eclipse with the Erlide plugin from http://erlide.org is needed. For the 'core_nif' project Eclipse with the C/C++ development tools is needed. An easy way set up both development environments is to download Eclipse CDT from http://eclipse.org and then add the Erlide plugin.

The 'core_nif' project refers to Erlang header files for C. To adapt the .cproject file to the current Erlang environment, type

make eclipse-setup

Feedback

Comments, ideas and improvements are welcome. Contact the author at

fowlay/antonius