dykstrom / ronja

An XBoard/WinBoard chess engine written in Java

Ronja

An XBoard/WinBoard chess engine written in Java.

System Requirements

Ronja is a chess engine. It provides only a simple, character based user interface. It is highly recommended that you run it from a chess GUI like XBoard/WinBoard or Arena. You will also need a Java runtime installed to run Ronja.

• Ronja versions 0.7.0 and earlier require Java 8.
• Ronja versions 0.8.x require Java 11.
• Ronja versions 0.9.0 and later require Java 17+.

Installation

Download the latest release from the GitHub releases page, and unzip it into a directory of your choice. Let's call this directory <ronja_home>.

XBoard

Find the XBoard resource file .xboardrc in your home directory. Now find the option -firstChessProgramNames in this file. Add a line like the following in the list of chess programs:

"Ronja" -fcp ./ronja -fd <ronja_home>

WinBoard

Find your WinBoard .ini file. It will be located somewhere in your home directory in AppData/Roaming. Now find the option /firstChessProgramNames in this file. Add a line like the following in the list of chess programs:

"Ronja" -fcp ronja.bat -fd <ronja_home>

Arena

In Arena, you should go to Engines | Install New Engine... In the dialog that appears, navigate to <ronja_home> and select ronja.bat. In the next dialog, set the type of the engine to Winboard. That's it!

Description

Ronja is written entirely in Java, and has its own opening book. It implements a few of the commonly seen features of chess engines:

• Iterative deepening
• Alpha-beta pruning
• Move ordering

Ronja is designed in an object-oriented way, with classes representing positions, and other entities. This makes the engine rather slow, and so may be changed in the future.

ronja's Issues

Recompiling for newer Java versions

It would be nice, if you could recompile Ronja 0.60 and 0.70 for newer Java versions, because they rely on deprecated libraries. Thanks a lot.
http://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?p=780726#p780726

exceptions and crashes..

Hi. I've been testing my engine against ronja 0.8.2. Ronja lost 10/10 games due to crashes/exceptions. I thought you may want to know about it. Here are logs from Arena:
ronja.0.8.2.arenaDebug.log

I didn't test the 0.9.0 version.

I played 10 game tournament with some predefined starting positions:

[Event "1 .King's Pawn Game"]
1.e4 e5
[Event "2. Queen's Pawn Game"]
1.d4 
[Event "3. English Opening"]
1.c4 
[Event "4. Zukertort Opening"]
1.Nf3
[Event "5. Scandinavian Defense"]
1.e4 d5

I turned off ronjas book but then I tried to start it with book to - didn't make any difference.

Java .exe-file by Roman Koldaev

The author of SJCE https://sourceforge.net/projects/sjce/ created a jar-file here:
ronja.zip - no engine´s output is visible on Arena GUI http://www.playwitharena.com/ - perhaps a sensible time-management is missing

platform independent Java executable file (.jar) for Ronja

Can you build such a jar-file please? Arena, ChessGUI and WinBoard are supporting such a file.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jre8-downloads-2133155.html

jar-file for Ronja 0.8.0?

Could you please build a Java executable file of upcoming v0.8.0 please?