The best chess engines, according to hackers
5 chess engines recommended in Hacker News comments over the past year, ranked by how many separate people recommend each one.
All chess engines
- StockfishFree open-source chess engine that plays stronger than any human and is widely used to analyse games. Critics say its analysis is too strong to teach weaker players and it sometimes gives odd evaluations.47recommend
- Sameshi chess engineTiny chess engine that fits in about 2KB of code and plays around 1200 Elo; people admire the compactness. Critics note missing castling, en passant and promotion.10recommend
- Chessmaster 3000Remembered fondly as a chess tutor with audio-visual lessons; people who learned from it as kids still recommend it, though it's hard to run on modern machines.6recommend
- Leela Chess ZeroFree chess engine built on deep neural networks, named by people among the strongest chess engines and used in top-level play.5recommend
- Regex ChessRecommended as a novel demo: a chess engine built from 84,688 regular expressions that generates legal moves. Caveat: it plays badly and can lose on one illegal move.5recommend