Although the continuation of the annual releases has become highly unlikely, I have named this page "2027 Release", albeit with a question mark. For the time being, it serves only to record the more significant changes for future releases.

1. UCI engine installation

A lot has changed around engine installation. This all happened to make command line arguments possible, which are heavily needed by such engines like Lc0 (Leela Chess Zero). The hard task was to make it work with old installations.

2. UCI engine implementation

One of the hardest things in the early days of the Chess Suite was the very first implementation of UCI engines. More than a dozen files were written and lots of experiences on different engines were necessary to get stable code. This was about 10 years ago and the code had to be touched here and there every year -- a thing no user is aware of. Now, in the age of AI, WE did a completely new and much better version of the central communication class. Less than 40% if the original lines of code and almost all internal stuff is much easier now. That means less errors once the testing phase is over. And it was not much work. These awesome AI tools cannot do it alone, but supervised by an experienced programmer they behave like magic. Will you notice some changes? Probably not. There are some, but I hardly believe that anyone except me will find them. Nevertheless I felt that I should mention this development on this page, so that users can see that I am actively maintaining and improving the software.

And the time has to be used now. AI companies are now striving for profit. AI used in a professional setting can cost between €500 and €1,000 per programmer per day. There are not many viable free options, and there may soon be none at all. And going back to programming that's 10, 20, or 50 times slower is almost unimaginable, even though that was the standard until the last release. Crazy times.