Play chess old school style
by Rob Griffiths, Macworld.com
Macworld – San Francisco, CA, USA
It’s not hard to count the number of bundled games in OS X (not counting games available via Terminal). The total count is one—Chess, which you’ll find in the Applications folder. While you can run this game easily enough in the Finder with a double-click, that really wouldn’t make for much of a hint. Instead, we’re going to take a look at how you can directly access the engine that runs Chess from Terminal.
Why would you want to do this? Honestly, I’m not sure—perhaps you’re a chess addict, playing for hours on end, and you’re tired of all the beautiful 3-D eye candy in the GUI version. Or maybe you’re a purist, and you prefer to enter your moves in algebraic chess notation, instead of dragging pieces around. Whatever the reason, here’s how to access the guts of Chess via Terminal.
Chess, it turns out, is powered by Sjeng, an open-source chess engine. To access Sjeng, open Terminal and type this command:
Click here to see the full commands.
How strong is the program?