About Nocheng

About

nochetoengi is an very dumb UCI chess engine, which was created for testing purposes. But it is also great help for practicing blindfold games. It can make completely random (but valid) moves. Once you are good enough in beating nochetoengi blindfold, you can challenge stockfish at his lower skills level. It is also good choice if you teach kids to play chess.

nochetoengi screenshot

Why is nochetoengi called nocheng? The nocheng name is its original name compoud from "nocheto engine". If you try to write program name in linux console, you can use tabulator to complete the name. So, you write "noche" and press tabulator and the console try to complete the name, if it is unique. Unfortunately, in this case, nocheto and nocheng starts both with "noche". Renaming to nochetoengi allows the tabulator to complete at least nocheto, which is what you usually want to run.

How to use

You can use nochetoengi with every chess GUI, which support UCI protocol. With nocheto, you can just run nocheto with --engine nocheng option. Then you might want to change the strength of this engine by level command.

nocheng in nocheto

Its perfect to use nocheng with nocheto to play blindfold, or use nocheng with any graphical user interface (like Pychess) to teach children play chess. Nocheng at its lowest level plays completely random (but valid) moves!

UCI protocol

Nocheng accepts any UCI commands, but not all functions are implemented. For example, you cannot play game with given time for moves. (Well, you can play, but the engine ignore time given to him for thinking).

UCI options

Skill Level

option name Skill Level type spin default 0 min 0 max 20

Skill level is used to set the strength of the engine.

level 0 and 1
This levels makes completely random (but valid) moves
level 2
This level looks for the best looking move in given position. But it doesn't look any deeper. So it is still very, very weak.
level 3 and 20
This levels looks for best moves 3 respectively 20 moves depth. It goes for all possible moves, so it finds the best move for the depth its manages to go in given time for thinking.
Note, that to go to deep 20 in this case is practically impossible due to the time it would take.
levels 4 to 19
This levels looks for best moves in 4 to 19 moves depth. It doesn't go for all possible moves, so it can get deep in search, but it can miss best moves.

I do not recommend using any level above 3. It is too weak and too slow. Use stockfish at its low levels instead.

OwnBook

option name OwnBook type check default true

Nocheng doesn't have its own opening book, but it has this options to fool chess GUI. Otherwise chess GUI might use their own openings book, limiting usage of the engine (GUI might use its own opening book, so no random moves at the beginning).

UCI_Chess9601.1.0

option name UCI_Chess960 type check default false

Inform engine that game whould be treated as Chess 960 variant.