[elija]

Well Knights is installed and running OK. On my laptop it really
makes the fan work though. It is apparently using the crafty
engine if that means anything.

I just took it to 13 moves. Which really was unlucky for me.

[ThomasDA]

Originally Posted by elija

I'm currently using XUbuntu and it does have several chess
programs but none of them seem to be particularly beginner
friendly.

You should have a look at the latest PyChess release (Philidor 0.8 final) It has had some specific work on making the Easy mode much more easy.

[elija]

I'll take a look thanks

[imranka]

You can check this site also.

[i92guboj]

Most times the dificulty can be adjusted. But it's also true that most times, the dificulty level is just a number that tells the program how deep it can go in a tree.

Data trees are tipical data structures used on IA. The programs calculates all the possibilities and their future consequences, storing them into a tree. Then, each node on the tree is evaluated using rules, and the winner node is the one that is chosen.

The dificulty level often tells the program how deep it can go while calculating nodes. The problem with this method is that it's not really inteligent, nor realistic. If you instruct your program to calculate only two future moves then it's idiotic. And if you configure it to foresee 30 turns then it's just impossible to beat, unless you are Gary Kasparov.

There must be chess programs that might use more inteligent algorythms that are not based on this principle. Though I can't tell you which one because I am not a chess master myself.

[ozar]

elija, another computer chess game that might work for you is eboard:

eboard

It's gtk based so should work well with your xfce desktop environment.