![]() GNU Chess 6.0.0 on XBoard 4.5.1 |
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Developer(s) | The GNU Chess Team |
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Stable release | 6.0.2 / March 4, 2012 |
Operating system | GNU/Linux, Unix, Mac OS X |
Type | Computer chess |
License | GPL v3 or later |
Website | GNU Chess |
GNU Chess is a computer program which plays a full game of chess against a human being or other computer program. The goal of GNU Chess is to serve as a basis for research. It has been used in numerous research contexts.
GNU Chess is free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 or any later version, and is maintained by collaborating developers. It's one of the oldest computer chess programs for Unix-based computers and one of the earliest available with full source code. GNU Chess has been ported to many other platforms.
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Features
On basic, current computer chess architecture, GNU Chess plays at senior master/weak international master strength (2500+ Elo on simple hardware - Intel Core 2 Duo), without parallel processing, according to the IQ6 test suite.
It is often used in conjunction with a GUI program such as XBoard. Initial versions of XBoard's Chess Engine Communication Protocol were based on GNU Chess's command line interface. Version 6 also supports the Universal Chess Interface (UCI).
History
The first version of GNU Chess was written by Stuart Cracraft. This project is one of the older parts of the GNU package of software, having started in 1984, the author having collaborated with Richard Stallman, pre-GNU.
Versions from 2 to 4 were written by John Stanback. Version 5 was written by Chua Kong-Sian. Version 6 was written by Fabien Letouzey. Dozens of programmers have enhanced and expanded GNU Chess.
In 2011, GNU Chess underwent transition to version 6, which is based on Letouzey's Fruit 2.1 chess engine, a strong and well-debugged searcher with heavy use of invariant assertions, and very few bugs.
Some GNU Chess enthusiasts still maintain the 5.07 code base,[1] adding new features and making it stronger. According to CCRL[2] the current version of GNU Chess 5 is about 350 Elo stronger than the original FSF version. It is still weaker than GNU Chess 6 however.
See also
References
External links
- http://www.gnu.org/software/chess/
- http://chess.delorie.com/
- http://wifight.com/ Play against gnuchess on PalmOS devices.
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