To install Stockfish v1.9.1 in Fedora 13 (32-bit):

WARNING: Prepare to be humiliated if you play against this chess engine...

Stockfish is roughly the 2nd strongest chess engine in the world. The latest Rybka may be somewhat stronger. Stockfish plays at Grandmaster level, especially when it uses opening books, etc. Best of all, current versions of Stockfish are available to anyone at no charge and the software is also Open Source. The Rybka chess engine is neither free nor open.

I like watching Stockfish lay the smackdown on different chess engines. PyChess can have engines play aginst each other if you select "Game > New Game" and then change the drop-downs and sliders for the white and black players. I also enjoy watching it beat down my friends who think they are "all that and a bag of chips" on a chess board.

Relative strength (based on single elimination 'Rapid' games (15 min + 5 seconds / move, 32-bit 1CPU):

PyChess 0.10b4 < GNU Chess 5.07 < Crafty 19.19 < Sjeng 11.2 < Phalanx XXII < Stockfish 1.9.1

Stockfish v1.7.1 Estimated Elo: 3221 on a 64-bit 4CPU machine

I suspect I need to do some work to ensure the opening book is functional for this engine.

cd /tmp
wget http://cl.ly/2h80/content  
unzip stockfish-191-linux.zip
cd stockfish-191-linux/src
sudo yum -y install gcc-c++ make 
make build ARCH=x86-32
sudo make install 
cd /tmp
rm -rf stockfish*

To install GNU Chess 5.07 on Fedora 13 (32-bit):

GNU Chess lets most modern computers play a full game of chess. It has a plain terminal interface but supports visual interfaces such as xboard. Version 5.07 is the current release, maintained by Simon Waters. On the Free Internet Chess Server (freechess.org), GNU Chess 5.04 running on a Cyrix 166Mhz processor (Pentium 200MHz equivalent), with default settings attained a blitz rating of above 2100. On a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM "nextgnu" on FICS attained standard rating of 2296, a Blitz ranking of 2237, and a Lightening rating of 2513 (Oct 2004).

Relative strength (based on single elimination 'Rapid' games (15 min + 5 seconds / move, 32-bit 1CPU):

PyChess 0.10b4 < GNU Chess 5.07 < Crafty 19.19 < Sjeng 11.2 < Phalanx XXII < Stockfish 1.9.1

GNU Chess 5.07 Estimated Elo: 2349

sudo yum -y install gnuchess

To install Crafty v19.19 on Fedora 13 (32-bit):

"Crafty is a free, open-source computer chess program developed by Dr. Robert M. Hyatt. Crafty is constantly being improved by a small team of contributors, including Dr. Hyatt."

Crafty 23.3 is available as of 2010-OCT-20 but I do not have a RPM for the current version and it does not seem to compile correctly. I will add another entry once I test it successfully.

Relative strength (based on single elimination 'Rapid' games (15 min + 5 seconds / move, 32-bit 1CPU):

PyChess 0.10b4 < GNU Chess 5.07 < Crafty 19.19 < Sjeng 11.2 < Phalanx XXII < Stockfish 1.9.1

Crafty v23.1 Estimated Elo: 2911 on a 64-bit, 4CPU machine.

wget -Nc ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/Mandriva/official/2010.0/i586/media/contrib/release/crafty-19.19-5mdv2009.0.i586.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh crafty-19.19-5mdv2009.0.i586.rpm
sudo ln -s /usr/games/crafty /usr/local/bin/crafty
sudo ln -s /usr/share/games/crafty/book.bin /usr/local/bin/book.bin
sudo ln -s /usr/share/games/crafty/bookc.bin /usr/local/bin/bookc.bin
sudo ln -s /usr/share/games/crafty/books.bin /usr/local/bin/books.bin
rm -f crafty-19.19-5mdv2009.0.i586.rpm

To install Sjeng 11.2 on Fedora 13 (32-bit):

Sjeng is a strong chess engine by Gian-Carlo Pascutto from Belgium. Sjeng is able to make use of multiple computer processors and is able to play some chess variants, such as Chess960, crazyhouse and giveaway chess. An earlier open source version of Sjeng has been the engine of the standard Mac OS X Chess application since Mac OS X v10.4. Sjeng is no longer free; this is the last free version that I know of.

Relative strength (based on single elimination 'Rapid' games (15 min + 5 seconds / move, 32-bit 1CPU):

PyChess 0.10b4 < GNU Chess 5.07 < Crafty 19.19 < Sjeng 11.2 < Phalanx XXII < Stockfish 1.9.1

Sjeng 11.2 Estimated Elo: 2450

I suspect I need to do some work to ensure the opening book is functional for this engine.

sudo yum -y install gdbm
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libgdbm.so.2 /usr/lib/libgdbm.so.3
wget -Nc ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/Mandriva/official/2010.1/i586//media/contrib/release/sjeng-free-11.2-7mdv2010.0.i586.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps sjeng-free-11.2-7mdv2010.0.i586.rpm
sudo ln -s /usr/games/sjeng /usr/local/bin/sjeng 
rm -f sjeng-free-11.2-7mdv2010.0.i586.rpm

To install Phalanx XXII in Fedora 13 (32-bit):

The Phalanx chess engine was originally created by Dusan Dobes who released it under the GPL circa 2000. Phalanx's playing style is supposed to be quite human-like. At full strength, "it may be compared to a intermediate-to-strong club player." Development on Phalanx seems to have stopped around 2006.

Relative strength (based on single elimination 'Rapid' games (15 min + 5 seconds / move, 32-bit 1CPU):

PyChess 0.10b4 < GNU Chess 5.07 < Crafty 19.19 < Sjeng 11.2 < Phalanx XXII < Stockfish 1.9.1

Phlanax XXII Estimated Elo: unknown

Because Phalanx often beats Sjeng, I think something is odd about the relative strength. Perhaps because it is so old, it runs better in 32-bit tests?

wget -Nc ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/ftp.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/suse/i586/phalanx-22-512.86.i586.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh phalanx-22-512.86.i586.rpm
rm -f phalanx-22-512.86.i586.rpm

You can run Windows engines on PyChess? as well. In StautonRc1? it requires you to position your executable in your PATH. In newer versions, it is sufficient to supply a path element to you engine entry:

<engines version="0.10.1">
    <engine binname="DeepRybka.exe" protocol="uci" protover="1">
        <path>/home/thomas/engines/Deep Rybka 4/DeepRybka.exe</path>
        <vm binname="wine" />
    </engine>
</engines>

Referring to lobais:

Where can i get the file to edit this path? My intention is ti use rybka or frtiz engine in Pychess. ThankYou?

~/.config/pychess/engines.xml