Computer programs for chess composition
I’m going to speak about some of the most popular solving programs for chess composition. Of course, I can comment only the programs I use, so I’ll start from them. But first of all I’d like to tell THANK YOU! to all the programmers, who spends their time to write these programs, to improve them, to answer user’s questions and who still have to hear our critics sometimes…
Popeye
Popeye is a chess problem solving and testing software which supports orthodox and fairy chess genres. The program was originally created for MS-DOS in 1983. Under Windows it works in command prompt. The last version is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/popeye-chess/files/
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The advantages:
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Inconveniences, the users might have:
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I’m going to show on the examples (for Windows):
- How to install popeye
- How popeye works
- How to avoid some frequent problems the users have
- How to use interfaces programs together with popeye
WinChloe
WinChloe is a software devoted to chess problems written by Christian Poisson. The program supports fairy pieces, conditions, shows themes, has a big database. It is really very powerful! Also, I’d like to add a comment that Mr. Poisson replies to the emails very promptly!
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The advantages:
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Problems, the users might experience:
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I’m going to show some actions you can do with this program, and also useful options and settings of it. Please also leave your comments/questions for me to know what might be useful to write about!
Ankona
Ankona is a web-based program for diagram imaging, storing and solving chess problems, written by Ilja Ketris (Latvia). The site ankona.ch is commissioned by the WFCC. The program uses web interface, has it’s own databases of problems and authors, uses popeye as a solving engine. So, at Ankona you can use all the pieces and conditions which uses popeye. This is my primary soft.
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The advantages
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The disadvantages
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Olive
Olive by Dmitri Turevski is a free open source cross-platform graphical front-end for Popeye chess software and more. Named after the fictional character Olive Oyl, girlfriend of Popeye the Sailor.
Windows self-extracting archive you can download from http://www.yacpdb.org/#static/olive. Currently available: olive-0.13.6.exe
Highly recommended! Hopefully, some more details will come….
Jacobi
Jacobi by François Labelle can solve fairy proof games. The program is a web app that runs in your browser and requires no installation. It can solve proof games that Popeye struggles with, which by itself is a good enough reason to add Jacobi to your toolbox. There are also new possibilities like allowing undefined pieces in the diagram of a proof game.
How to try Jacobi for people in a hurry:
– Find an example problem that interests you from the documentation page.
– Click on the corresponding “Load in solver” button.
– On the solver page, click “Start”.
(François Labelle)
See also an article: Solving program Jacobi equipped with constraints – a new tool to check proof games
(by Michel Caillaud, Nicolas Dupont, François Labelle)
Спасибо огромное, постараюсь разобраться потихоньку.
I think it is okTime to upgrade with Olive, Jacoby, Dugan’s Chess Composer.
Meant Diyan’s chess composer
As far as I know, Popeye is currently being developed on GitHub at https://github.com/thomas-maeder/popeye and that’s where the latest version can be found.
I recommend Teddy as an interface to Popeye. It can be downloaded from http://problemskak.dk/.
How can I add a little functionality to POPEYE?
Download the source code and change it. You will then need a compiler.
You will also need a fair degree of C programming skills!;)
If you are into orthodox SPGs, you might want to try Stelvio: https://www.thbrand.de/stelvio-seite/
As members of the Chess problems and studies Discord server are aware, Reto has been quietly developing and testing this new program over the past year. It was finally released as v1.0 on 27-Jan. It appears to be the fastest PG solver yet! Give it a try! As it is Java based, it runs ok on multiple platforms – Windows, Linux, Mac. It should be possible to run it on Android too, though I couldn’t succeed.