GNU Chess Copyright (C) 1987 Stuart Cracraft (Copying permission notice at the end.) GNU Chess is your program (as long as you follow the copyright and licensing rules listed in the file COPYING). Your contribution to GNU Chess will be retained and given to hundreds of other GNU Chess devotees. Each improvement you make is important not just to you, but also to all of us. As such, you must give us your changes. And in fact, you are required to do so. This program is one small step toward making generally available a chess program with source to inspire current and future software developers. This document ------------- This document is not meant to be a an introduction to computer chess. The following books are excellent introductions and treatises. They are listed in order of difficulty: Computer Chess (2nd edition), by David Welsh and Boris Bazcynski The Joy of Computer Chess, by David Levy Chess Skill in Man and Machine (2nd edition), by Peter Frey Current Distribution -------------------- The most recent distribution of GNU Chess contains the following main-level files and directories: Filename Purpose ------------------------------------------------------ README Pointer to main README below. gnuchess.c Most recent version of GNU Chess gnuchess.book Most recent version of opening book ...in sub-directory DOCUMENTATION... ARTICLE A GNU Bulletin article about the program. ARTICLE.2 An ACM/IEEE & ICCA article about the program. CHANGES Lists changes since initial release. COPYING GNU general license README This file ...in individual subdirectories... Bitmapper Bit-mapping routines (for interest only) Xchess X Windows interface Fancy Displays -------------- Currently, GNU Chess supports two different styles of windowing support for a fancy board. Fancy boards make it easier to play the game, because all the chess-pieces are displayed in lovely chess fonts on a big bitmap screen. How this generally happens is as follows: GNU Chess is invoked through the windowing support program which communicates with GNU Chess as a separate process, talking with GNU Chess in order to transmit and receive moves. All communication with GNU Chess, when using a windowing support program, is done through the windowing support system, generally via the use of a "mouse". The first style of chess windowing support is for the X windowing system. We provide full sources to the X-chess windowing display manager within the sub-directory 'Xchess' of this distribution. X-chess has quite a few more features than SUN's chesstool. For this reason, the truly supported window system for GNU Chess is X-chess. If you find a bug in X-chess, you may report it to us. The second style of chess windowing support is SUN's chesstool. It is fully documented in SUN's manual pages. However, here's a suggestion. When you've configured the Makefile in this distribution appropriately for chesstool, invoke GNU Chess with "chesstool GNU Chess nn" where nn is the number of seconds you wish GNU Chess to average per move. If you find a bug in chesstool, you may report it to us. Conclusion ---------- GNU Chess has been well-debugged as of 1987, seems to play on a wide variety of machines, but nothing is guaranteed. You can help this program by making it better. Please remember that GNU Chess is purely experimental and has not participated in any rated tournaments. You are welcome to enter it in a tournament, but proper recognition must be given to the author and the Free Software Foundation. If any spectators inquire about the program during the tournament, you are also morally bound to tell them how you got the program and either to supply them with the distribution you received from us, or for the latest version, tell the spectator our address so that he may get it directly from us. We would also like you to tell us if you are entering it in a tournament. If you have a hardware implementation of some of the functions normally carried out in software, and if you would like to interface your special-purpose hardware to GNU Chess, we will be more than happy to talk with you. If you have large chess databases, either of patterns, chess knowledge, or game-listings, and if you feel these could be of use in the development of GNU Chess, we want to talk with you. If you make any changes, additions, modifications, improvements, please be sure to pass along all your modifications to the address listed below. We will provide a tape of GNU Chess, its full and most recent sources, as well as the opening book(s), but there is a $150 handling charge if you want to get GNU Chess from us directly. Only if you are on our network we can provide it to you free of charge. Stuart Cracraft 3021-B Harbor Blvd. Costa Mesa, Ca. 92626 U.S.A. 714-751-4327 Copyright (C) 1987 Stuart Cracraft Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the copyright notice and permission notice are preserved, and that the distributor grants the recipient permission for further redistribution as permitted by this notice. Modified versions of this document may not be made.