Dear GNU Chess friends and all kind GNU supporters and followers, We are proud to announce a test release of GNU Chess version 6, a major update of GNU Chess, which had remained unchanged since the release of version 5.07 back in 2004. This is another milestone in the long history of GNU Chess begun by Stuart Cracraft in 1984, when GNU itself was just starting out.
You can download the GNU Chess pretest from the following URL: http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/chess/ This is an alpha version that we are publishing for testing purposes and for receiving feedback from users. For that reason, we strongly encourage you to kindly provide us with any comments. Before releasing the official v6, alpha version(s) will be named 5.9.*. GNU Chess v6 is greatly indebted to Fabien Letouzey, the author of the famous Fruit chess program. In fact, it uses Fruit v2.1 as the chess engine, which remains basically unchanged. The main goal for GNU Chess v6 was to integrate Fruit v2.1 and the good old GNU Chess v5 interface. Thus, backwards compatibility has been a main driver for the development. Fabien's Polyglot 1.4 made possible this integration. GNU Chess has been successfully tested as backend of XBoard. In addition to the old interface, GNU Chess provides a UCI mode through a new command-line option. In UCI mode, the standard input/ouitput are directly linked to the engine. We are aware of the need for some improvements before an official release is made public. Not all v5 commands are working in v6 yet. But at this stage we think that it is worth to start receiving feedback. We have tested it on GNU/Linux and Mac OS X. This release does not work on MS Windows. Contributors interested in that platform are invited to send patches. GNU Chess has been tested playing at FICS as GNUChessSix(C). You will find it ocassionally there in the evenings (CET), and it will be happy to accept challenges. As far as I am concerned, poor chess human player, it beats me very easily. We hope you will enjoy GNU Chess v6! --Antonio Ceballos, Simon Waters, Stuart Cracraft
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