Eindhoven, December 13th, 2003

This message is to announce the release of MSCP 1.3.

The source distribution is available through
        http://bitpit.net/mscp/
I am not able to construct binaries for windows, but
I am willing to link to binary distributions that are
reported back to me.

MSCP is Marcel's Simple Chess Program. Its main purpose
is to be a small, simple, yet complete chess engine. MSCP
includes aspiration window tree search, quiscence search,
move sorting, position evaluation, hash tables, opening book,
standard algebraic move input and output. It works well
with both xboard and icsdrone and it should run without
trouble in winboard (but I haven't tested that).

Release 1.3 fixes some bugs and adds one function:
- fixed pawn evaluation bug
- fixed another move undo bug that corrupted the board
- cleaned up parts of the code and added more comments
- added repetition detection in the search
This version plays somewhat stronger than 1.2

The code is very stable. MSCP has played over 350,000 blitz
games on FICS (freechess.org) and nearly 250,000 games on
ICC (chessclub.com). It wins most of its games against
humans but it is not overly strong: people do have a fair
chance of beating it.

MSCP 1.3 is released under the GNU GPL (see file COPYING
for details.)

Enjoy,

        Marcel

--  _   _
  _| |_|_|
 |_    |_     marcelk@bitpit.net
         |_|  Marcel van Kervinck