Getting Sigma Chess to work with Stockfish

Hey guys i'm pretty new to chess in general, and I was trying to find a good way to analyze my games easily. I have the Sigma Chess GUI for my mac, and wanted to give it the best engine as possible. I've downloaded Stockfish but I can't apply it to Sigma cause Stockfish has its own GUI. How can i download the stockfish engine onto the Sigma GUI?

Have you read this:

http://www.sigmachess.com/_usersmanual/ManualData/UCI.html

yeh already checked it out, see i can't take the uci from stockfish because it's its own application with GUI and all. Sigma only lets you load an engine thats already in a certain format. What i want to know is if there's a way to isolate the stockfish engine from its gui.

sounds like it's great advice, unfortunately i'm not that skilled with the terminal

Ok, I see your problem. I don't think offtherook has the solution to your problem. Just tried that myself and it didn't work. Although I might be wrong. What I think you msut do is download the source code and compile the non-gui version of Stockfish.

 IT WORKS! man this engine is so much faster. Thanks for the extensive help I really appreciate it :D

If you have Mac OS 10.3 or higher, you can connect the Mac OS X Stockfish UCI engine directly to Sigma Chess without using a Terminal window.  Since the Stockfish UCI engine lives inside a folder that the Mac Finder hides by default, the trick is to make the folder visible in the Finder so the Sigma Engine Manager can see it.  Here's how.

* Quit Sigma Chess if it's running.

* Open a Finder window.

* In the Finder window, navigate to the Stockfish application, control-click on it, and select "Show Package Contents".

* In the new Finder window that opens, drag the Contents folder to the sidebar on the left side of the Finder window.  The Finder will add a Contents folder icon to the sidebar.

* Launch Sigma Chess.

* Select Analyze -> Engine -> Engine Manager.

* Click the Add button.

* In sidebar of  the "Add UCI Chess Engine" window, the Contents folder will now be visible.  Click on it, then click on the Resources folder.

* Click on file named "sf" -- which is the Stockfish UCI engine.

* Click the Open button.  Sigma Chess will add the Stockfish UCI engine to its engine list.

* To hide the Contents folder again, open a Finder window and drag the Contents folder icon in the sidebar to any place outside the window.  The icon will go poof and disappear, but the Contents folder itself will be unaffected.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for this information--it solved basically my same problem installing stockfish engine into Exachess--I found SF, created an alias and moved it into the Exachess engine folder.

btw, is there any way to find a position in Exachess and bring up Sigma (not just indication the Hiarcs engine) so that you could use the (superior) engine controls and read out in Sigma? A year ago I saw some discussion about opening up Sigma under Exachess, but I've never seen any that it can be accomplished.

Damn, I made everything as suggested adding that "sf" and Sigma still don't recognize Stockfish as valid UCI engine.

opengame offers a solution if you don't want to/know how to compile the Stockfish engine yourself. A quick summary:

1. Download Stockfish here. (Or go to Stockfish' home page)
2. Click on the downloaded file (mount it).
3. Open terminal (type terminal in the serach field upper right corner) and type: cp /Volumes/stockfish-191-mac/Stockfish.app/Contents/Resources/sf ~/Desktop
4. Locate the sf file on your desktop. Move the file to a "better" location (i.e. the Sigma Chess application folder under your applications).
5. Open Sigma and click on Analyze->Engine->Engine Manager.
6. Click on Add and locate the sf file and click open.

Any questions or errors, please ask again.

If you know how to compile, then download the source code from the website. The Stockfish engine should be easier to locate.

Ypperlig89 :thanx for your help! Though something is wrong on my comp : Sigma thinks about 30 seconds while trying to add sf, then gives an error message : "Please check that this is valid engine supporting UCI protocol", something like that.

Yigor: When I was using another Mac that's slower than the one I have now, I would sometimes get a message like "Please check that this is a valid engine supporting UCI protocol" when Sigma was trying to load the perfectly valid HIARCS 11 UCI engine.  I think Sigma was sending a message to the engine and waiting for a response to come back, and the response was taking too long for some reason.  I found that Sigma often loaded the engine successfully in spite of the error message, and if it didn't, trying again would usually fix the problem, presumably because whatever was taking too long was faster on the second try due to memory buffering.

If the Stockfish engine is failing to load for some other reason, it might be because you don't have UNIX execute permission on the engine file.

Browniesbane: There's no slick, built-in integration between Sigma and Exachess, and neither application is scriptable.  But, if you run both applications at once, you can copy and paste games in PGN format, and positions in EPD format, back and forth.  This would probably give you most of what you want.

Sometimes I use Sigma to analyze a game and Exachess to play through the analysis.  Exachess can parse the analysis output that comes from Sigma, and by copying and pasting Sigma analysis into an Exachess game window, I can review all of the variations with point-and-click convenience, and without creating any branch windows as you would need to do using Sigma alone.

Too bad we can't have Sigma's engine controls and Exachess' parsing capability in a single application.

@offtherook: I don't think Sigma can change the rating of other engines. Are you one hundred percent you have loaded the Stockfish engine? In the analysis field it should say Engine: Stockfish 1.9.1 64bit. If so: check if everything is set at default (Engine Manager->Default Options). My Stockfish engine works and beat both the Sigma engine and HIARCS engine in the engine match; a decisive victory too!

(Also: Check what kind of playing modes & levels you have selected.)

offtherook: The UCI engine file "sf" may not be self-contained and may depend on other files that are packaged in the Stockfish application, so I'd try running the engine "in place" within the application if you're not already doing that.  If you're running a copy of "sf" that you made with "cp" or by compiling "sf" yourself, you may be missing something important.

I'm running the engine in place, and it's very strong.  The Stockfish engine beat up my older version of HIARCS in Sigma engine matches I played.

Here are my options for Stockfish in the Sigma Engine Manager.  I believe these are all defaults.

Use Search Log: Off

Search Log Filename: SearchLog.txt

Book File: book.bin

Best Book Move: Off

Mobility (Middle Game): 100

Mobility (Endgame): 100

Pawn Structure (Middle Game): 100

Pawn Structure (Endgame): 100

Passed Pawns (Middle Game): 100

Passed Pawns (Endgame): 100

Space: 100

Aggressiveness: 100

Cowardice: 100

Check Extension (PV nodes): 2

Check Extension (non-PV nodes): 1

Minimum Split Depth: 4

Threads: 4

Hash: 32 MB

OwnBook: On

MultiPV: 1

Emergency Move Horizon: 40

Emergency Base Time: 200

Emergency Move Time: 70

Minimum Thinking Time: 20

It's interesting that the Sigma Engine Manager lists the "Location" of the Stockfish engine as being "/Applications/Stockfish.app/Contents" even though I actually told it to load the "sf" file in the "Resources" folder -- as per my first post in this thread.  This, too, makes me think that the environment of "sf" is important.

Oops, scratch that.  The Sigma Engine Manager lists the "Location" of the Stockfish engine as being "/Applications/Stockfish.app/Contents/Resources/sf" as I would have expected.

@opengame:

I compiled the engine and only copied the sf file and it works with charm on my computer.

Set the two engines up for an engine match to check which one of the versions the strongest!