Most Powerful Chess Engines Of All Time
Hello everyone, this is me with you again, and today I will talk with you about chess engines.
Chess Engine
It's 1997, and the world watches in disbelief as GM Garry Kasparov, arguably the best chess player in history, loses a match against a computer. The era of chess engines has started, changing the game's landscape forever.
Here is what you need to know about chess engines:
Leela Chess Zero
Komodo Chess
Deep Blue
Shredder Chess
Fritz
Conclusion
What Is a Chess Engine?
A chess engine in an online program that analysis your game, and calculates the best move for your game or analysis mistakes, if instead of people chess engines would rule the world then it will be a very long battle. Chess.com for analysis uses Komodo Chess engine which I will be explaining below.
Engines are way powerful than humans, some of them have an elo rating of 3000 such as the Stockfish, and Komodo. Engines are getting way powerful each year as newer, and more powerful versions of them are released.
Here is a video of strong chess engines.
Most Powerful Chess Engines
Many chess engines are available, but only a few of them continuously appear on the top ranks of computer championships. Here is a list of the most popular engines.
Alpha Zero
AlphaZero is a computer program developed by artificial intelligence research company DeepMind to master the games of chess, shogi and go. This algorithm uses an approach similar to AlphaGo Zero.
On December 5, 2017, the DeepMind team released a preprint introducing AlphaZero, which within 24 hours of training achieved a superhuman level of play in these three games by defeating world-champion programs Stockfish, elmo, and the three-day version of AlphaGo Zero. In each case it made use of custom tensor processing units (TPUs) that the Google programs were optimized to use. AlphaZero was trained solely via "self-play" using 5,000 first-generation TPUs to generate the games and 64 second-generation TPUs to train the neural networks, all in parallel, with no access to opening books or endgame tables. After four hours of training, DeepMind estimated AlphaZero was playing chess at a higher Elo rating than Stockfish 8; after nine hours of training, the algorithm defeated Stockfish 8 in a time-controlled 100-game tournament (28 wins, 0 losses, and 72 draws). The trained algorithm played on a single machine with four TPUs.
DeepMind's paper on AlphaZero was published in the journal Science on 7 December 2018. In 2019 DeepMind published a new paper detailing MuZero, a new algorithm able to generalise AlphaZero's work, playing both Atari and board games without knowledge of the rules or representations of the game.
Stockfish
Stockfish is a free and open-source chess engine, available for various desktop and mobile platforms. It can be used in chess software through the Universal Chess Interface.
Stockfish is consistently ranked first or near the top of most chess-engine rating lists and is the strongest CPU chess engine in the world. It has won the Top Chess Engine Championship 11 times.
Stockfish is developed by Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski, Gary Linscott, Tord Romstad, Stéphane Nicolet, Stefan Geschwentner, and Joost VandeVondele, with many contributions from a community of open-source developers. It is derived from Glaurung, an open-source engine by Tord Romstad released in 2004.
Here's a video of NM Sam Copeland going over a gorgeous victory by Stockfish NNUE (now incorporated into Stockfish) over none other than Leela Chess Zero.
Leela Chess Zero
Leela Chess Zero is currently the second strongest publicly available chess engine. The engine (which also goes by the names Lc0, LCZero, and Leela) is part of an open-source neural network project started in 2018.
Lc0 is inspired by DeepMind's AlphaZero project and has learned the game through reinforcement learning and repeated self-play.
Here's a video of IM Danny Rensch analyzing one of Leela's masterpieces:
Komodo Chess
Komodo is one of the dominant and most successful Universal Chess Interface chess engines on the market. Don Dailey developed it in 2010, and Mark Lefler kept working on it in 2013. The engine also has counted on the support of GM Larry Kaufmann for many years to improve its playing skills.
Chess.com acquired Komodo in 2018 and uses it on our Play Computer page. The engine's ability to run at different playing strengths, with different styles and opening books, has made it a popular choice among players.
Give Komodo a go and try playing against one of its different personalities available here on Chess.com!
Deep Blue
Deep Blue was a chess computer created by IBM as part of a publicity stunt. The company wanted to display its computer's processing power and arranged a match against Kasparov, the world champion at the time.
Deep Blue played two matches against Kasparov, one in 1996 and another in 1997. Deep Blue lost the first match but defeated the world champion the next year, causing an uproar of mixed emotions. While many people marveled at the power of technology, it was the first time a computer ever put human superiority over machines in check.
Shredder Chess
Shredder is a commercial chess engine that can be purchased by anyone. Stefan Meyer-Kahlen created the engine and user interface in Germany in 1993.
Shredder is available on multiple platforms, like Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android, iOS, and even on Amazon Kindle.
Fritz
Fritz, another commercial chess program, was developed by Frans Morsch and added to ChessBase in 1991. Like most others on this list, Fritz has won many Computer Chess Championship titles over the years.
Fritz is available on Windows and multiple other platforms. Since 2009, the engine has also been available for some consoles like Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, and Sony Playstation 3.
Fritz chess engine.
Coclusion
You now know what a chess engine is, which engines are the strongest, and how to play one of the best chess engines on Chess.com. Head over to Chess.com/CCC to watch top chess engines competing against each other at any time and day!
