Chess engines

Chess engines are programs who figure out good chess moves. They are made to be used by chess interfaces such as XBoard, but can also be used stand-alone in console-mode.

There are four good alternatives available which can all be used as a back-end for chess games like knights and XBoard:

• GNU Chess
• Crafty
• Phalanx
• Stockfish

Most distributions will only have one or two of these, most likely just GNU Chess and Stockfish.