Chess programs

[Callum Lerwick]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 2:35 AM, Olavi Halme <omhalme64 at kolumbus.fi> wrote:
> Have you plans to publish official chess programs for e. Scid and
> Stockfish? These programs are modern and efficient programs and have
> published in many other Linux systems. But why not in Fedora?

For those who don't know, since chess is such a well defined and
universal game, basically all computer chess programs are divided into
seperate UI and engine processes, communicating with a standard
protocol. In fact, most engine developers don't bother writing GUIs at
all, and vice versa, so you have to mix and match.

There are two protocols in use, "Xboard/Winboard/Chess Engine
Communication Protocol", which is basically just GNU Chess's text
interface, which has been around a long time and is widely supported
in the open source world, but is a bit hacky having not been designed
to be a universal standard in the first place. Then there's UCI, a
newer better protocol, which does not yet seem to be widely supported
in the open source world. We don't seem to have anything supporting it
in Fedora yet, however a Xboard/UCI adapter exists:

http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/html/details1/PolyGlot.html

Stockfish is generally considered the strongest open source engine
right now, and is a UCI engine, and Scid is an open source "chess
database" that apparently also acts as an Xboard/UCI GUI. Getting Scid
into the distribution is probably a good start.

I'm completely terrible at chess, I'm lucky if I can beat GNU chess on
gnome chess's easy setting (only look two moves ahead) so I have not
had a burning desire to get any strong engines into the
distribution... :)