What do you think are the top 3 engines in order of strength

What do you think are the top 3 engines in order of strength?

there are plenty of engine rating lists. GIYF

1. Houdini 3
2. Houdini 2
3. Houdini 1.5
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Houdini, Stockfish, Critter without looking.

Looked here http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/

and I was pretty close.  Houdini, Critter, Rybka with Stockfish next.

Because there was a huge engine tournament held called TCEC, 150' + 60" , and it was

1. Houdini 3
2. Stockfish 2
3. Rybka 4

but on lists it's different engines and orders. So I wanted to know some opinions about it.

I read that houdini 1.5 is still stronger than any engine on the world.

Well except for the improved versions of Houdini, yes.

The recent TCEC chess tournament results showed that Stockfish is stronger in the French Adv than is Houdini with a win as White, and a win as Black.

Their overall score was 25-23 out of 48 games.

In the 5-Minute-Tournament I'm having the free engines have a go at each other it currently is:

1. Critter 1.6   46/58
2. Houdini 1.5  43/58
3. Bouquet 1.6 40/59
4. Stockfish 3 39.5/59
5. Strealka 5.5 37/59 

Stockfish isn't really up there when it comes to KNodes/s but maybe in longer time-controls it becomes more powerfull with better positional evaluation.

If you are using an engine to evaluate a position then there are no time controls.

they are both pretty dumb imo

what up with fritz?

Fritz 13 is number 12 on the rankings, below HIARCS, which is listed 9th. HIARCS came in 6th place in the TCEC tournament.

Komodo CCT has surpassed Houdini 2 at http://www.inwoba.de/index.html. It's relatively new, so hasn't been tested at CCRL (well, there's 4 games there), for example.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=top+rated+chess+engines+2013

http://chess-table.blogspot.com/2012/12/download-best-chess-engines.html  (free downloads)

PS: The OP question has no relevancy to amatuer chessplayers (ie those below master level) IMHO, BUT I think it's possible that other features, and/or interfaces may make one engine "better" than another for a particular user. AND depending on the OS and PC's capabilities some engines will work better in one environment than another, and some won't work at all depending on other factors such as the amt of available RAM or whatever. For instance I can't do anything else at all if Komodo is analyzing a game (it hogs up 99% of the CPU) and some other engine just crashed every time I tried to run it on my PC

Whatcha mean by "no relevancy to amateur chessplayers"?

Doesn't everyone feel better to be smashed by the strongest chess engine instead of only the second strongest? :o

Good point!

i think it is

1.houdini 3

2.komodo 5

3.goes to stockfish or critter depending on where you look

although i prefer stockfish over critter because stockfish gets to trustable plys quicker than critter.

What is a "trustable ply?" And how much faster is stockfish than critter? I'm really curious, not trying to be snide or facetious here (for a change)

a trustable ply usually depends on the person i guess but i find a depth of 25 to 30 be accurate enough for my tastes and for an idea of how much faster stockfish is, is that it gets to a depth of 20 on my computer in 3 seconds and for critter to do the same it takes 24 seconds.