Beginner friendly chess engine

errr - why have you gone offline?

I recommend Lucas Chess ( free software ) for beginner. You can play with computer from Elo 158! or 900 etc.
http://www-lucaschess.rhcloud.com/

His entire harddrive got wiped out

Ron Jeremy just lost another customer!

I'm chuckling right now and I shouldn't.....I just had pictures of a bruised and battered, really shabby looking andonuts climbing back into the internet, 'yeah - bad one'!

I recommend chessmaster, i used to use it back when i was a beginner. Too bad it only operates of windows xp or less. :(

It's safe. I ran it through my uber-AV, which said it was clean. Just to be safe, I ran it against virustotal also ... and it came up 100% clean.

www.virustotal.com/en/file/990081eb777138bdef4e94186e56b90f849fd4b5179b12a2a3656552b9a6eaee/analysis/ if anyone cares.

As for me going offline ... boss. xD

Well, I wrote this program, and the source code may be made available later, when it stabilizes and gets brushed up a bit. Checking files for viruses with virustotal is a common practice and I have no objections if anybody runs this check with my program. Sourceforge has its own virus checking system, but it takes time for a "virus free" badge to appear on the page.

But you should try it if you want to know in what way it's different. Weakening a strong chess engine is usually a difficult thing to do and it introduces randomness and makes your playing experience less smooth. You can see some strong moves and some blunders from an engine, with overall degradation of the quality of playing experience. Also, the ELO slider is not very informative, and not so many engines fully support it. This program is different in that it uses a 'tactical' evaluation function combined with a limited depth, which leads to it attempting to gain control over the board squares and pieces, but leaves space for your tactical exercises. I am going to develop a stronger engine, but this one has a certain style of play that I wanted to preserve by making this specific spin-off.

When I run the program Alex, a window opens with a black screen and a flashing screen? What should I do next?