1. Best Chess Training Software 2017
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5. Best Chess Training Software For Mac
6. Best Chess Training Software For Mac
7. Best Chess Training Software 2017
8. Best Chess Software For Learning

A chess engine usually analyzes thousands of outcomes before making an efficient move. Since the hardware and programming techniques are getting better year by year, chess engines are becoming more intelligent. Modern engines are more selective and have a better positional understanding.

A chess engine usually analyzes thousands of outcomes before making an efficient move. Since the hardware and programming techniques are getting better year by year, chess engines are becoming more intelligent. Modern engines are more selective and have a better positional understanding.

If you construct a complete tree of all possible moves in a chess board, the total number of positions would be about 10¹²⁰. That’s an extremely large number. To put that into context, there have been only 10²⁶ nanoseconds since the Big Bang and estimated 10⁷⁵ atoms in the entire universe. These numbers are dwarfed by the number of possible moves in chess, making it one of the most complex board game.

There are numerous rating lists that measure the relative strength of the chess engine, based on how many moves they make per minute. Along with ranking chess engines, the lists also provide margins of errors on the given ratings.

• It virtually has no rival in chess teaching software, at least as far as my research goes. Chessmaster doesn't have the best chess engine though, so if you plan on playing professional chess you'll need a better engine after you reach master level. I owned a copy of Chessmaster 10k and it featured, from what I can remember.
• Best Chess Training Software Fritz 15. Fritz 15 is one of the most common and infamous names when discussing. Rybka continues to be the top undisputed and unchallengeable computer chess program. Any list concerning the best chess pc games can’t be completed without Shredder.
• Chessmaster and Fritz have been the market leading offering in this field for the last 20-30 years - we take an in-depth look at the quality and value for money of these two software packages, looking in detail at the strength of the engines and additional features offered.

Among these organizations, the most famous are CCRL (Computer Chess Rating Lists) and CEGT (Chess Engines Grand Tournament). Keeping both these ratings in mind, we are presenting the most advanced Chess Engines that demonstrate machine’s domination over humanity.

18. Hannibal

CCRL Rating: 3229
CEGT Rating: 3094

Hannibal is a Universal Chess Interface (UCI) engine that incorporates ideas from earlier engines, Twisted Logic and LearningLemming. It uses alpha-beta technique with several other chess specific heuristics and relies on a selective search.

The engine has a good understanding of material imbalances and has incredible endgame knowledge. It also understands the fortresses and trapped pieces and can sacrifice material for the initiative on king attacks. Moreover, the engines’ time management is tuned for the Fischer time controls.

17. Critter

CCRL Rating: 3232
CEGT Rating: 3098

Critter is the UCI chess engine available for Windows, Mac, Android, and Linux. You can use it for private purpose only. It was initially written in Delphi but later converted to C++ using Bitboard technology in order to increase the performance on 64-bit processors.

The engine features null move pruning, forward pruning, principal variation search, parallel search with up to 8 threads, blockage detection in the endgames, and supports Gaviota tablebases.

16. Suger XPro

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CCRL Rating: 3533

SugaR engine is derived from Stockfish, and supports up to 128 cores. Like Stockfish, it is not a complete chess program and requires compatible GUI like XBoard with Arena, PolyGlot, Shredder, Sigma Chess and Chess Partner in order to be used fully.

SugaR engine defaults to one search thread, therefore it’s recommended to inspect Threads UCI parameter to make sure it matches the total number of CPU cores. Since the engine is distributed under the General Public License, you are free to modify and sell it.

15. asmFish

CCRL Rating: 3506

asmFish is a Stockfish engine port in x86 assembly language, which uses BMI2 and AVX2 instructions optionally. It is assembled with FASM for Linux and Windows platforms.

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asmFish is built with some structural optimization techniques, such as the elimination of piece lists. Critical functions don’t conform to the x86 ABI concerning the usage of register and calling convention. However, less time-critical functions were ported through GCC assembly output. Moreover, the engine supports parallel search, large pages and is NUMA aware.

14. Chiron

CCRL Rating: 3241
CEGT Rating: 3123

Chiron is the commercial chess engine that supports both Universal Chess Interface and Chess Engine Communication Protocol, and several endgame tablebase and bitbase formats.

It applies parallel search on multiprocessor architectures and implements pawn blockage detection that not only detects blockages in pawn endgame but also other pieces on the board. The latest version has been tuned deeply, especially in terms of passing pawns and mobility, and several search enhancements have been introduced, like Lazy symmetric multiprocessing, forward pruning, and NUMA awareness

13. Equinox

CCRL Rating: 3253
CEGT Rating: 3122

Equinox is a symmetric multiprocessing chess engine primarily developed by Giancarlo Delli Colli, taking ideas from open source engines like Stockfish, Crafty, and Ippolit.

Equinox is active in several private engine tournaments, including Italian Open Chess Software Cups and Thoresen Chess Engine Competition.

12. GullChess

CCRL Rating: 3261
CEGT Rating: 3183

GullChess is an open source engine that applies magic bitboards to determine sliding piece attacks. It is mostly written in C++ programming language and contains only one source file.

Gull Engine features generic function templates in recursive search routines and several other functions for move generation (excluding ‘hash move’ and ‘side to move’). LazyGull is derived from Gull 3 and features Syzygy Bases, PDEP bitboards and Lazy SMP for modern x86 processors.

11. Schooner

CCRL Rating: 3284

Schooner uses alpha-beta search, late move reductions (LMR), principle search window (PVS), and single hash entry. It supports a subset of Universal Chess Interface to automatically play games without consuming much time.

Its performance has been improved a lot in the recent years: a simpler evaluation inspired by Xiphos, staged move generation and tons of testing and tuning are responsible for those improvements.

10. Xiphos

CCRL Rating: 3324
CEGT Rating: 3193

Xiphos is an open source chess engine written in C and distributed under GNU General Public License. It’s a UCI compliant engine that utilizes bitboards with ERLEF mapping.

Xiphos uses sliding piece attacks which are evaluated by either PEXT bitboards (for BMI2) or magic bitboards. If you want to try, you can run this engine on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

9. Deep Shredder

CCRL Rating: 3324
CEGT Rating: 3153

Shredder is a commercial chess engine built in 1993. It has won more than 20 titles, including World Microcomputer Chess Championship (1996, 2000), World Computer Chess Championship (1999, 2003), World Chess Software Championship (2010), and World Computer Speed Chess Championship (5 times).

Deep Shredder is the multiprocessor version of Shredder. It comes with a graphical user interface, developed by Millennium Chess System, which supports Universal Chess Interface and compatible with other UCI engines available for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux.

8. Booot

WCCC 2011, Booot vs Alex Morozov

CCRL Rating: 3326
CEGT Rating: 3234

Booot is an open source chess engine written in Delphi 6. It determines sliding piece attacks with rotated bitboards, and is packed with lazy SMP and fully redesigned evaluation function.

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The engine applies PVS with all basic search enhancements like late move reductions, null move pruning, and internal iterative deepening. The latest version supports multiprocessor architecture and has several assembly variants for 32 and 64 bits.

7. Andscacs

CCRL Rating: 3337
CEGT Rating: 3209

First published in 2014, Andscacs soon evolved into one of the world’s best chess engines. It uses magic bitboard to speed up the attack calculations. It applies a principal variation search with transposition table inside an iterative framework.

Andscacs features static exchange evaluation, threaded parallel search, and it tries a hash move in quiescence search even in the case of a quiet move. In order to make the engine more powerful and efficient, about 200 evaluation features were optimized with 750,000 positions, which minimized the standard deviation of Andscacs’ static evaluation.

Read: Google’s AlphaZero AI Masters Chess and Go Within 24 Hours

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6. Fizbo

CCRL Rating: 3347
CEGT Rating: 3211

Fizbo is a Chess Engine Communication Protocol, first released in 2014. It is based on bitboard and uses population count instruction. For now, the engine is compatible with Windows and requires CPU with pop-count instruction.

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Fizbo performs parallel searches based on enhanced PV splitting algorithm, along with iterative deepening. Transposition table with 8-byte entries is used in quiescence search.

5. Ethereal

CCRL Rating: 3386
CEGT Rating: 3290

Ethereal is an open source engine developed by Andrew Grant. It’s a UCI-compliant chess engine first released in 2016 under GNU GPL license.

Ethereal is greatly influenced by Stockfish, MadChess, and Crafty. In addition to the conventional alpha-beta framework, it uses a variety of reduction, pruning, extension, and other improvements.

4. Fire

CCRL Rating: 3430
CEGT Rating: 3319

Fire is a free chess engine that was used to be open source but later became a closed Windows executable, available for new Intel processors. It was initially known as Firebird and later renamed to Fire due to trademark naming conflict.

The Fire engine features magic bitboards, Syzygy tablebases, configurable hash, and multiPV. You can configure it with over 70 Universal Chess Interface options, and apply SMP parallel search.

3. Komodo

CCRL Rating: 3508
CEGT Rating: 3424

Komodo was derived from an older search engine, Doch, as a major rewrite and a port of Komodo to C++11. It has a quite different positional style as it relies on evaluation, instead of depth. Komodo has won three-times Top Chess Engine Championship.

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The engine supports up to 64 cores, Syzygy endgame tablebase, and Fischer random chess. Kodomo lets you save engine’s analysis of a position so you can check it later and resume analysis. You can also control how the engine makes long-term sacrifices of pawn structure for dynamic play.

2. Houdini

CCRL Rating: 3529
CEGT Rating: 3444

Houdini is known for its engine’s positional style, ability to defend strongly, tenacity in hard positions and escape with a draw. Till date, it has won 3 seasons of Top Chess Engine Championship.

Read: 15 Advanced Artificial Intelligence Projects

The new version of Houdini comes in 2 variations – Standard and Pro. The previous version supported up to 8 processor cores only, whereas the Pro version supports up to 128 cores, 128 GB of RAM and is NUMA aware. Also, it can use Nailmov endgame table bases.

1. Stockfish

CCRL Rating: 3564
CEGT Rating: 3512

Stockfish is an open source UCI engine available for various desktop and mobile platform. It is based on another open source chess engine named Glaurung. As of 2017, Stockfish artificial intelligence is used by Lichess, an online chess site.

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Read: 8 Best Artificial Intelligence Programming Languages

Written in C++, the engine can utilize up to 512 CPU cores and maximum size of its transposition table is 1 Terabyte. It implements alpha-beta search and uses bitboards. And of course, it features aggressive pruning and late move reductions.

BabasChess - best interface for the Free Internet Chess Server. Can handle PGNs, engines for analysis (UCI and Winboard), and is nearly infinitely customizable. I maintain a website devoted to this interface:

Lucas Chess - Amazing piece of software that is severly under-rated. Lots of really great training modes, very customizable (can add new positions for study, store your opening repertoire and let you practice it, etc.)

Chess Hero - Also under-rated. Let's you pick positions from PGNs in a myriad of ways (randomly, sequentially, etc.) for practicing. Can be just quiet positions picked randomly from big files of games or specific positions selected for whatever reason (tactics, etc.). Performance graded based on configurable criteria (game move is best, computer engine grading, etc.).

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Scid vs. PC - Database software that does everything one could possibly need in a database program. This is a more recently upated fork of the SCID project.

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Chess Position Trainer - Trial version is free, but you can pay for more features. Full features work for a month before deactivating to the free version. The features of the free version are functional for nearly everyone. Allows you to enter your own repertoire of opening moves quickly and easily and then train yourself to memorize what you have entered/learned using various flashcard/spaced repetition methods.

I really feel any budding chess player should have all five of these free programs. I also feel commercial software is unnecessary due to the quality of these programs.