About Nocheng
About
The nochetoengi is a very "dumb" UCI chess engine, which was orignally developed for testing Nocheto.
But it is also a great help for practicing blindfold games. It can play completely random (but valid) moves. Once you are good enough in beating nochetoengi blindfold, you can challenge stockfish.
It is also a great choice if you teach kids to play chess. This engine is easy to beat!
Why is nochetoengi called nocheng? The nocheng name is its original name, compounded from "nocheto engine". If you start typing the program name in the Linux console, you can use the tab key to complete the full name. So, you type "noche" and press tab, and the console tries to complete the name if it's unique. Unfortunately, in this case, nocheto and nocheng both start with "noche". Renaming to nochetoengi allows tab to complete at least nocheto, which is what you usually want to run.
How to use nocheng
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 can
change the strength of this engine by level command in nocheto.
Use it to to play blindfold in nocheto or use it with any graphical user interface (like Pychess) to teach children 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 a 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 a 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 search all possible positions, so it finds the best move for the depth
it manages to go in a given thinking time.
Note that to go 20 moves deep in this case is practically impossible due to the time it would take. - levels 4 to 19
- This levels look for the best moves in 4 to 19 moves depth. They do not go for all possible moves, so they can get deep in search, but they also can miss the best move.
I do not recommend using any level above 3. It is too weak and too slow. Use for example stockfish at his 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 (so no random moves at the beginning of the game would be played).
UCI_Chess9601.1.0
option name UCI_Chess960 type check default false
Inform engine that game whould be treated as Chess 960 variant.