GNU Chess v6 pretest

[Antonio Ceballos]

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