Engine Updates

Andscacs 0.71 (UCI)
Win32/64
- improved evaluation of passed pawns
- general improvement of speed
- fixed some bugs
- new king safety evaluation
- little improvements on LMR
- improved mobility values
- removed second hash of evaluations; now uses only main hash for this
http://www.andscacs.com/ (homepage)

Jazz r821 (WB)
Jazz r818 (WB)
C source; Win32/64, Linux32/64
- corrects some bugs in the previous r799 that caused problems (crashes) in Windows
- changes are otherwise minor
http://www.eglebbk.dds.nl/program/chess-download.html

Nirvanachess 2.0 (UCI)
mp; Win64
- complete rewrite of the code
- converted to bitboards
- added mp
- a complete rewrite of the engine
- now uses bitboards instead of a 10x12 board representation
- fixed multiple bugged located in the old evaluation function's code
- improved king safety
- hanging pieces are now penalized
- now supports multiple cores
- "approximately 100 Elo stronger than version 1.8 on a single core"
http://nirvanachess.blogspot.com/

Quokka (UCI)
new source-code-only engine by 'Matt P.'
C++ source; incomplete
- incomplete, but movegen might be functional
https://github.com/mp3259/Quokka

Chess News

Kvetka 3.24 Chess GUI (UCI)
designed for game viewing and analysis; several plug-ins available; available in a portable version
http://kvetka.org/en/

Chess Programming Blogs

MadChess: http://www.madchess.net/post/madchess-2-0-beta-build-29

Wiki Page Changes

Nothing new today

Bonus Notifications (recent releases of free stuff)

Warnings:
- do not install unwanted toolbars, etc.
- alpha releases have new features; crashes and bugs are to be expected
- beta releases have new features; they may contain bugs or crash
- release candidate software may contain minor bugs; crashes are rare

Adblock Plus 1.3 for IE
free, open source browser plugin that blocks most web advertisements
http://adblockplus.org/en/

Redis 2.8.19 Stable
free, popular, open source database; uses key-value store model
- experimental support for Windows
- full support for Linux
http://redis.io/download

Speccy 1.27
free Windows system information tool
http://www.piriform.com/speccy (Speccy homepage)
http://www.piriform.com/blog/2014/12/16/speccy-v127 (announcement)

SuperAntiSpyware 6.0.1168 Free Edition
removes spyware, adware and malware; Windows only; no resident scanning for free version
http://www.superantispyware.com/

Tails 1.2.2
Debian-based Linux32 distro; GNOME desktop; #24 in popularity
distro has the goal of providing complete Internet anonymity for the user
https://tails.boum.org/

Tanglu 2.0
Linux distro based on Debian(testing); GNOME, KDE desktops; #49 in popularity
http://tanglu.org/

Meaning of Colors

Red = New or Warning
Green = Updated
Gray = Info Only

Engine List: http://computer-chess.org/doku.php?id=computer_chess:wiki:lists:chess_engine_list
Chess News: http://computer-chess.org/doku.php?id=computer_chess:wiki:lists:chess_news_list

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