On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 2:35 AM, Olavi Halme <omhalme64(a)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... :)