🚀 go-pugleaf

GNU Chess is a program that *plays* chess.  You can play against it, or you
can have it play against itself or analyze games.  It has a built-in ASCII
interface, or you can use the XBoard graphical front-end with it.

XBoard is a graphical chess user interface for the X window system.  You can
use it in any of several ways: (1) With GNU Chess, to play games against GNU
Chess.  (2) With the ICS, to play games against other ICS users, observe ICS
games, etc.  (3) With the cmail program (included with XBoard) to play
correspondence chess by email.  (4) As an electronic chessboard to play over
games.  You can load just about any game you find in algebraic notation, click
in games, save them, add comments, etc.

You said:
> I know you can use
> it [GNU Chess] in conjunction with XBoard to play another player over the
> ICS. 

You do *not* need GNU Chess to use XBoard for purposes (2), (3), and (4).
That is, you don't need GNU Chess unless you want to use GNU Chess.  In
particular, you don't need GNU Chess to use XBoard with the ICS.  (What would
GNU Chess be doing?)  So the above statement is not quite right.

I do have some interface software that I use to connect a copy of GNU Chess to
the ICS.  The computer player "Zippy" (and a couple of other computer players)
uses this interface.  The interface uses XBoard as a core, but I don't make it
freely available to everyone; it isn't part of the normal XBoard distribution.
I doubt this was what you were thinking about.

You also said:
> XBoard *must* be used in conjunction with other chess software--GNU chess
> or the ICS--to play a game, correct?

The above is correct, I think, depending on exactly what you mean.  If you
want to play against an opponent (as opposed to studying or annotating games),
you need either GNU Chess, access to the ICS via telnet, or cmail.

> Ahh, one last question? Relative to other chess programs, how difficult is
> GNU Chess?

GNU Chess is not as strong as commercial programs like Chess Genius, but it
seems to be the strongest of the free chess programs.  Its strength of course
depends on how fast a machine you run it on, and it fluctuates from one
patchlevel to the next as the development team fixes bugs and experiments with
new ideas.  Running on a fast workstation, it tends to have an ICS rating in
the Expert or Master range.

	--Tim