GNU Chess 6 released

[Antonio Ceballos]

I am glad to announce the first official release of GNU Chess v6.

GNU Chess is a free chess-playing program developed as part of

the GNU project of the Free Software Foundation. The first version

was written back in 1984 by Stuart Cracraft.

Version 6 is a major change of GNU Chess, because it is based

on Fruit v2.1, a completely different chess engine. Fruit was written

by Fabien Letouzey, thus he is the primary author of GNU Chess v6.

Backwards compatibility with v5 has been kept to a large extent.

This means that it can still be used to play chess in "standalone" 

mode on a command-line terminal, but it is more often used as 

a backend chess engine of other programs such as XBoard

(http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard/).

GNU Chess v6 supports the two main chess engine protocols:

- Chess Engine Communication Protocol, although it may not 

support the latest updates; and

- Universal Chess Interface (UCI).

Version 5 is no longer under active development. We will maintain 

it for essential bugs for some time, but of course we recommend

using version 6.

The home page can be found at the usual location:

  http://www.gnu.org/software/chess/

You can get the compressed sources from a nearby mirror:

  http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/chess/gnuchess-6.0.0.tar.gz

If automatic redirection fails, the list of mirrors is at:

  http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

Or if need be you can use the main GNU ftp server:

  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/chess/gnuchess-6.0.0.tar.gz

The development source can be downloaded from the Subversion 

repository at Savannah:

  http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/chess

Bug reports, your kind contributions and any feedback are welcome. 

You can contact us on the following address: address@hidden

GNU Chess v6 is a chess program significantly stronger than version 5.

We hope it will be enjoyed for long by many, not only chess players,

but also chess programmers keen on studying and improving it.

--GNU Chess team