crafty(6)
NAME
crafty - a chess playing/analysis program
SYNOPSIS
crafty
DESCRIPTION
crafty is a chess playing and analysis program modeled
after Cray Blitz. It supports opening books and endgame
databases. While you can run it on a text console you
will probably prefer a graphical interface. In that case
use xcrafty which uses xboard(6).
crafty is a state-of-the-art computer chess program,
and uses all of the search algorithms you have proba
bly read about, negascout search, killer/history move
ordering, quiescence move ordering and pruning, hash
(transposition/refutation) tables as well as evaluation
caches, selective extensions, recursive null-move search,
and a host of other features that have been used and are
still being used in most computer chess programs. If
it's not in crafty, either it is on the "to do" list, or
it has been tried, found wanting, and discarded.
crafty's strength is directly dependant upon processor
speed, hash table size, size and content of it's opening
book, and it's use of an endgame database. Versions of
crafty running on ICC and FICS have ratings around
2500-2700.
This crafty package comes with a basic opening book and a
small endgame database (all the 3 piece tablebase files).
You can get a more complete opening book (created from
650000+ games) and a huge endgame database (about 5 GByte)
from crafty's ftp site at
ftp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt.
A more extensive documentation is available in
/usr/doc/packages/crafty.
Please note that this version of crafty has been modified
to look for its files in ~/.crafty/, not in the current
working directory.
FILES
- ~/.craftyrc
- crafty's startup file. Contains commands executed by crafty automatically during startup.
- ~/.crafty/book.bin
- crafty's opening book.
- ~/.crafty/book.lrn
- Things learned, in human readable form.
- ~/.crafty/books.bin
- Controls crafty's opening strategy.
- ~/.crafty/position.bin
- Learned positional information.
- ~/.crafty/position.lrn
- Learned positional information in human readable
form. - ~/.crafty/game.*
- Your played games.
- ~/.crafty/log.*
- Complete crafty output produced during the game.
- /usr/share/crafty
- Location of the default opening books.
- /usr/share/crafty/tb
- Endgame tablebases. Get more from crafty's ftp site. :-)
BUGS
If you use crafty as a xboard(6) client and exit xboard(6)
using your window managers close button, crafty might not
finish at all and run forever.
Well, this might actually be considered a xboard(6) bug.