Chess Links
There are lots of freeware chess programs available on the Net. Many of these require Winboard or xboard as a user interface. For a big list of available programs, see Leo Dijksman's excellent WBEC web site.
Following are some links to free chess engines I'm especially familiar with, and recommend. All of these play a decent game of chess, good enough to be challenging for most amateurs. Fruit and Toga are probably the strongest of these (they are UCI engines, so don't work directly with Winboard - they can be used with Arena and other interfaces).| Alaric | Aristarch | The Baron | Booot |
| Crafty | Delfi | Frenzee | Fruit |
| Glaurung | Green Light Chess | Little Goliath | Pharaon |
| Postmodernist | Pro Deo | Scorpio | Slow Chess |
| Toga II | TRACE | Ufim | Wildcat |
The following strong chess engines are now commercial, but have earlier free versions still available:
| Rybka | free | commercial |
| Ruffian: | free | commercial |
Good general chess sites I like include Chess Cafe, TWIC (The Week in Chess), and chessgames.com.
If you want more info about chess programming, you might look at the following sites:- Wikipedia Computer Chess entry
- Chess Programming Wiki
- Paul Verhelt's Computer Chess Programming page
- Robert Hyatt's web site
- Programming Topics (Bruce Moreland)
- Programmer Stuff (Ed Schröder)
- Chess Programming Theory (Colin Frayn)
- Computer Chess Forum
- International Computer Games Association (ICGA)
Also check out ERIC, a robot that plays chess using a modified version of Arasan!