Arasan

[Michel Van den Bergh <michel.vandenbergh@uhasselt.be>]

Would anyone be interested in packaging (or just sponsoring) the chess 
engine Arasan?

http://www.arasanchess.org/

I am not talking about the user interface but just about the underlying 
console chess program. This should be trivial to package.

Such console chess programs are used by GUIs such as xboard and pychess 
who talk to them using standard protocols (either UCI or CECP).

Arasan has been around for many years. It has been slowly becoming 
stronger. Today it is multiprocessing and about the strength of crafty 
(which is in Debian). Arasan was completely independently developed from 
other open source chess engines which are often derived from the 
classical engines Fruit and Glaurung.  This means that Arasan has a 
different playing style from those other engines and this may appeal to 
humans.