Document: Crafty

Crafty

This document describes the issues related to running the
Crafty chess engine together with eboard.

Felipe Bergo 

1. What is Crafty ?
2. Getting Crafty
3. Compiling and Installing
4. Book files

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1. What is Crafty ?

Crafty is a chess engine developed by Robert M. Hyatt. It runs
on several platforms (Linux, *BSD, Win32, OS/2, etc.). A chess
engine is, in a nutshell, a piece of software that turns CPU cycles
into chess moves. It is quite a challenging kind of software to
write, so good chess engine programmers focus on the chess playing,
not on the user interface, which is usually a text interface.
Crafty is no exception. eboard can serve as a graphical chess
board interface for crafty.

Crafty is distributed under a proprietary license. Its main points are:
- you can get the source code
- reproduction and usage of source and binaries allowed for
  personal use only (this is detailed in the license text)
- usage on chess competitions requires written permission from the author
- copies of the source must keep the copyright notice intact
- changes to the code must be made public

The full terms are found in Crafty's main.c file.

2. Getting Crafty

Crafty can be downloaded from

   

If this link ever breaks, try searching for crafty on

   

3. Compiling and Installing

To unpack crafty,

mkdir crafty
cd crafty
tar zxvf crafty-xx.yy.tar.gz

After unpacking it, you must find a Makefile target that
matches your system. For Linux-i386 the most common
is "make linux-elf". There is a linux-i686-elf target,
but it may not work on your machine if it doesn't support
all optimizations. 

After compiling with "make {mytarget}", you'll have
a "crafty" binary in your current dir. Check if the build
worked by running it "./crafty" and play a couple of moves
(type "e2e4" at the White(1): prompt, use "display" to
show the board) -- if it doesn't ends abnormally with
a message like "Illegal Instruction" you're fine.

The binary must be placed in your PATH to work properly.
If you have root access you may wish to place it in
/usr/bin or /usr/local/bin. Else you can place it in
~/bin (~ is your home dir) and make sure this is
added to your path. The crafty binary must be
called just "crafty" (don't rename it), else eboard
won't find it.

4. Book files

Crafty can (and should) use book files with openings and
analysed games. These are found in crafty's ftp site
under the names books.bin and book.bin. eboard will look
for these in the following places (in this order -- and
both files should be placed in the same directory):

~/.eboard
~
/usr/local/share/eboard
/usr/share/eboard
/usr/local/share/crafty
/usr/share/crafty

The ~ means your home directory. Crafty's
output files will the placed in the 
~/.eboard/craftylog directory.