''PyChess'' is a
free software
Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...
chess
Chess is a board game for two players. It is an abstract strategy game that involves Perfect information, no hidden information and no elements of game of chance, chance. It is played on a square chessboard, board consisting of 64 squares arran ...
client developed for
GNU
GNU ( ) is an extensive collection of free software (394 packages ), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popu ...
. It allows users to play offline or online via the
Free Internet Chess Server (FICS). PyChess also incorporates a built-in
chess engine
In computer chess, a chess engine is a computer program that analyzes chess or List of chess variants, chess variant positions, and generates a move or list of moves that it regards as strongest.
A chess software engine, engine is usually a Front ...
, which in contrast to most other chess
AIs is written in the
Python language and focuses more on fun of play than raw strength. For more advanced users, PyChess allows for virtually any other external chess engine to be used with it.
History
Development on PyChess was started by Thomas Dybdahl Ahle in 2006, and the first public release was sent out later that year. The release contained the bare minimum of features to play a game of chess, and was backed only by the
GNU Chess
GNU Chess is a free software chess engine and command-line interface chessboard. The goal of GNU Chess is to serve as a basis for research, and as such it has been used in numerous contexts.
GNU Chess is free software, licensed under the terms ...
engine.
In the end of 2006, PyChess was close to become a part of
GNOME Games, which were holding a usage survey of aspiring new games to include in the suite.
Being nearly just started at the time, it lost to the more established
glChess, which managed to fix its hardware accelerating dependency before the end of the trial.
glChess is still developed as a part of GNOME today.
Afterwards there were talks of the two programs merging, but the developers decided they were targeting different user segments, with PyChess aiming towards more advanced users.
In 2009, PyChess won
Les Trophées du Libre in Paris in the category of hobby computing.
PyChess has grown steadily since then, with increasing year-to-year development activity, and would cost more than $500,000 to develop today in terms of the man-hours required to develop such a codebase.
By 2011 it was among the seven most frequently used chess clients to access the
Free Internet Chess Server, which in turn is the only non-web-based chess server available for Linux.
Version 0.12 of PyChess uses
PyGObject
PyGTK is a set of Python (programming language), Python Adapter pattern, wrappers for the GTK graphical user interface library (computer science), library. PyGTK is free software and licensed under the LGPL. It is analogous to PyQt/PySide and w ...
and GTK+ 3, prior versions used the obsoleted PyGTK.
Logo
The current PyChess logo was contributed by Karol Kreński in 2007. Karol's original design was very cartoonish, but was modified into a slightly calmer expression.
Aims
According to the PyChess website:
The PyChess project puts heavy emphasis on simplicity, trying to avoid the complicated
user interfaces
In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...
of
XBoard
XBoard is a graphical user interface chessboard for chess engines under the X Window System. It is developed and maintained as free software by the GNU project. WinBoard is a port of XBoard to run natively on Microsoft Windows.
Overview
Original ...
and BabasChess. This implies adding new features slowly, so they can be integrated in the overall usage scheme, and make things "just work". At the same time the project strives to contain most of the features known from major Windows chess clients such as
Chessbase
ChessBase is a German company that develops and sells chess software, maintains a chess news site, and operates an internet chess server for online chess. Founded in 1986, it maintains and sells large-scale databases containing the moves of recor ...
and ''Aquarium'' by ChessOK.
See also
*
GNOME Chess
References
External links
*
*
{{GNOME
Free chess software
Free software programmed in Python
Software that uses PyGTK
Software that uses PyGObject
2006 software