If looking for a chess partner that matches and challenges your skills, Arasan is an interesting open-source option to consider. This chess program comes with its own GUI, though it is fully compatible with Winboard, xboard, Arena, Fritz, or Chessbase thanks to its console-based engine. You can configure the program’s GUI to use the color combination and piece design of your choice.
You can play against Arasan, play against yourself, or let Arasan make all the moves and learn from its amazing capabilities. Arasan’s degree of difficulty is easily customizable from 0 to 100, the latter being the highest level. You can make your moves just by clicking on the piece and dragging it to the desired position in the chessboard. If in doubt, you can always ask the program for a hint to help you make your next move. All moves are neatly recorded – you can ask the program to show them for you at any time and even save them for future use.
You can customize nearly every detail of the game and the chessboard appearance – the colors or the squares, the position of the white and black pieces, the pieces’ appearance (Maya, Berlin, Marroquin, Merida, etc.), the board size, etc. You can also configure the gameplay to fit your preferences – who plays white, the search limits, Arasan’s strength, the amount of memory and cores to be used, and so on.
Arasan is free, simple, and comes with a database with more than 600,000 moves. Suitable for all players and skills thanks to its customizable level of difficulty, this app is an excellent tool to practice your chess, improve your skills, learn new movements and strategies, and compete with other players online.
v22.1 [Aug 6, 2020]
- Remove potential passer scoring.
- Tighten validation of hash/killer moves.
- Fix Resign threshold option (CECP mode).
- Simplify lmp threshold computation. No longer different for PV.
- Modify formula for lmp count. Do not allow 0 as depth index.
- Increase razor margin and reduce razoring depth.
- Fixes to singular search code. Verify hash move before doing a singular search.
- If singular extension is triggered, do not compute any additional extension, or reduction.
- Implement bench command. Use bench command for PGO.
- Update test tools to use pentanomial model for SPRT.
- MultiPV bug fixes, including a fix for bad ponder move output in MultiPV mode.
- Fix accept draw logic (CECP mode).
- Do not update history on fail high of 1st quiet and low depth (idea from Ethereal).
- Fix possible crash: when iterating through the search threads,ensure any that have.
- a null "work" pointer are skipped.
- Allow ProbCut while in check, and restrict recursive Probcut.
- Optimization in seeSign() function.
- Misc. code cleanup.
