GNU/Chess 5.03 Released

[Simon Waters]

GNU/Chess 5.03 is now available.

Download it from mirror sites listed at;

http://www.gnu.org/software/chess/


GNU/Chess is a free chess-playing program developed as part of
the GNU project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). 

GNU/Chess is a communal chess program. Contributors donate their
time and effort in order to make it a stronger, better, sleeker
program. Contributions take many forms: interfaces to
high-resolution displays, opening book treatises, speedups of
the underlying algorithms, additions of extra heuristics. These
contributions are then distributed to the large user-base so
that all may enjoy the fruits of our labor.



Changes of Note:

Build procedure now follows GNU conventions (./configure ; make)

The opening book has been removed from the distribution to
reduce size.
(The opening book is now "book_1.00.pgn.gz").

The opening book now compiles much faster.

The compiled opening book should be architecture independent.

All illegal moves, comments, and duplicates, have been removed
from the opening book.

Player names in the opening book are now consistent 
(The free chess database tool SCID was used for many of these
changes)

"bk" command implemented allows querying of the opening book.

The command line help is now useful.

The command line now utilizes "readline" if present at compile
time.

The input problem reported in BUGTRAQ is fixed (This was first
fixed in 5.03beta).

A log file bug was corrected to avoid stray illegal moves being
printed to the log file.

Other changes noted in the announcement of 5.03beta still apply.
In particular the default hash size is much lower than 5.02 to
make it easier to build on machines with limited memory.

(To increase hashsize with xboard add the following to
~/.Xdefaults "XBoard*initString: new\nhashsize 1000000")


Commentary:

The new build procedure means GNU/Chess may have different
optimization options on your platform, if you encounter dramatic
slow downs since 5.02 please report the platform and version of
GCC used, and any options that helped resolve the problem.

Fixing a bug in the handling of searches that exhausted their
time limit, means the program no longer plays certain "silly"
moves.

A number of contributed patches have substantially improved the
book handling. Users will need to recreate the "book.dat" file
from the PGN file, fortunately this is much faster than in 5.02.
The new book.dat file format is portable, but we prefer to
distribute the PGN file.

The program is now slightly stronger than 5.02 in playing
strength, the improved opening book handling make building a
more extensive opening book, and learning from it a more
pleasant experience.

The latest development version is now available from the GNU web
site via anonymous CVS.

Thanks to the many people who submitted patches, reported bugs,
and otherwise made this release possible.

        Have fun,

        Simon