Consider migrating Debian away from HoiChess
We discovered a bug in HoiChess, #32 (closed). Since it has no issue tracker, we can't report it. (It turned out to be a bug in GNOME Chess, but we should still consider this anyway.)
HoiChess is the default chess engine in Debian, and we should consider changing that.
I fear switching away from HoiChess would make the game much more difficult, though. I've spent some time playing with the GNU Chess settings to make it as easy as possible, but based on user complaints, I suspect it's still much more difficult than HoiChess. (I don't remember if I ever managed to beat it on easy, but probably not.) If anyone spends much time playing gnome-chess, you could help out with suggestions here, because I rarely play it other than when investigating bug reports.
History time: why does Debian use HoiChess, when no other distro does? From our NEWS file:
3.9.5 - July 29, 2013
=====================
Note for distributors:
We now recommend installing the HoiChess engine by default, instead of GNUChess
or Phalanx (or really anything else), in order to make the game actually
winnable for mortals. See the long-running Bug #475535 for more information on
why HoiChess is recommended. The Debian package has build patches, if needed.
That's why: it was the recommended default engine for the 3.10 release. Only Debian adopted the recommendation, because only Debian had HoiChess packaged in the first place, and HoiChess had been unmaintained for a long time at that point. But then:
3.11.90 - February 16, 2014
===========================
WARNING WARNING WARNING
This version switches to using the UCI protocol to communicate with GNU Chess.
UCI support was added in GNU Chess 6.0; however, it is buggy and causes 100% CPU
usage. This is a terrible user experience, and is fixed in GNU Chess 6.1.0.
And if your distribution still ships GNU Chess 5.x, then it won't work at all.
Please check your version of GNU Chess before updating!
* GNU Chess is now the recommended default chess engine for Linux distributions.
* New difficulty levels for GNU Chess. Feedback is highly desired!
Yeah, for 3.12 I called backsies and recommended GNU Chess again. Debian just never switched back. I'm sure Debian will be happy to change to whatever we suggest if we ask. I just wonder if the GNU Chess really is easy enough.
For the record, the difficulty settings from /etc/gnome-chess/engines.conf
:
[GNU Chess]
protocol=uci
binary=gnuchess
arg-easy-0=--uci
arg-normal-0=--uci
arg-hard-0=--uci
option-easy-0=Material 10
option-easy-1=Quiescence Check Plies 0
option-easy-2=NullMove Pruning var Never
option-easy-3=Verification Search var Never
option-easy-4=History Pruning false
option-normal-0=Material 30
option-normal-1=Quiescence Check Plies 0
option-normal-2=NullMove Pruning var Never
option-normal-3=History Pruning false
[HoiChess]
protocol=cecp
binary=hoichess
option-easy-0=easy
option-easy-1=sd 2
option-normal-0=easy
option-normal-1=sd 4
option-hard-0=hard
Could try turning GNU Chess down to Material 0
or Material 1
I suppose, though I wonder if it would just start obviously throwing pieces away at that point....