Why the name "ruffian"?
No-one really knows. It is a cool name. Ruffian is a dark horse.

How long did it take to develop?
Development started in 1998. It is developed by a single individual on his spare time.

How strong is ruffian?
It's roughly at 2400 playing on FICS on a Pentium II, 300Mhz.

Which protocols does ruffian support?
WB I, WB II and UCI.

Which operating systems does it support?
Linux, BSD, OSX and Windows.

Does it support SMP?
Not yet.

How much does it cost?
Ruffian is free for now.

How do I install it?
Read the install.txt included.

Ruffian seems to use only half the configured hash size
This is a little bit confusing but it is not a bug. When you specify e.g. a 64 meg hash, Ruffian will split the memory between three different hash tables and you can only see one of them (which uses about half of the available hash memory, rounded down to a power of two) in the log file.