Instead of reading a story before bed the other night, I decided to intoduce Emily to the game of chess by visiting Chesskids.com online. We ran through some of the ‘classes’ and she didn’t lose interest at all. We’ve spent several nights now learning the pieces and how they move (on the computer) and I’m looking forward to getting out a real board soon. I’ve never been a big chess player, but…(note: a lot of this article is specific to the Mac, but will be similar for all unix-like OSes)

Apple provides a ‘chess’ Application, which is basically just a graphical front end to gnuchess, the open source chess program. Since it’s made by Apple, it runs as a standard OS X program, but after playing some test openings, I noticed it was a bit buggy. In fact, it allowed some illegal moves! I am not running the latest version since I haven’t upgraded to Tiger (10.4) yet - but I wanted to be able to play against the latest and greatest gnuchess available (the latest is 5.07) and with the Apple chess program, I don’t even know what version I’m playing.

At first I thought I would be able to build the latest Apple chess version using Xcode, but I failed. I’m not sure why - I think I have an outdated gcc compiler - in any case, it was really too much trouble to figure it out. Instead I just downloaded the latest version of gnuchess directly and compiled that. Flushed with success I knew the next step was to get something to display the game in a window (the basic compile gets you a command line version). I quickly found xboard was what I needed, and downloaded it also. I needed to install the X11 SDK (this site helped out) since I had forgotten to install that when I installed Apple’s X11 X-Windows. This all went amazingly well and I was up and running the latest version of gnuchess pretty soon thereafter.

You can play against an older version of GNUchess online without installing anything (although without the drag and drop interface - you have to type ‘e2e3′ to move a pawn up for instance) at WebChess

I might give building Apple’s chess another shot now that I have the X11 SDK installed, that might have been the problem (no X header files), because one pesky thing I noticed: I stopped playing for a while to type this and the battery on the powerbook was draining more quickly than usual. I was thinking that the battery might be on the skids, when I had a hunch and touched the back of the aluminum case where it tends to get hot when it’s really working on something (like compiling programs and it *was* really hot. I called up a ‘top’ session in the terminal and there were two instances of gnuchess (both times I had started the game from the command line) and each was using about 30% of the processor resources. I think running gnuchess via xboard runs xgnuchess instead, but I’ll be more careful and check that I haven’t left any threads running next time.