Rybka Is World Champion Again
Rybka has retained it's title at the 17th World Computer Chess Championship, held in Pamplona, Spain from 11-18 May. A report on last year's championship is here.
This year's event featured 10 of the top chess programs in a round-robin competition. Of course, computers never tire, and are often pitted against one another over many hundreds, and even thousands of games to find their 'true' ratings.
Nevertheless, winning the World Championship again is a great achievement for the team behind the remarkable Rybka - unquestionably the strongest commercially available chess software.
This year's rules differed from last year in that the hardware for each program was limited to a maximum of 8 cores. Last year Rybka ran on 40 cores! 
But Rybka was still unstoppable, only giving up draws to Shredder and Hiarcs and winning the rest. Long live the little fish!
All the games are available at the International Computer Games Association Website.
The final standings were:
| Program | Hardware | Score | |
| 1 | Rybka | Intel Xeon W5580 @ 3.2GHz x 8 | 8 |
| 2 | Deep Sjeng | AMD 3.2Ghz x 4 (r1-7), Intel X5560 @ 2.8Ghz x 8 (r8-9) | 6.5 |
| 2 | Shredder | Intel Xeon W5580 @ 3.2GHz x 8 | 6.5 |
| 2 | Junior | Intel Xeon W5580 @ 3.2GHz x 8 | 6.5 |
| 5 | Hiarcs | Intel Xeon W5580 @ 3.2GHz x 8 | 6 |
| 6 | Jonny | 4.5 | |
| 7 | The Baron | AMD Opteron 270 @ 2.0Ghz x 4 | 3 |
| 8 | Equinox | 8x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5355 2.66GHz | 2 |
| 9 | Pandix 2009 | 1.5 | |
| 10 | Joker | 2.33GHz Core 2 Quad | 0.5 |
Rybka's crucial last round win against Junior...
Here are the final moments of the decisive game and the announcement of Rybka's victory.
Computer Chess Champions
| 1974 |
Kaissa |
| 1977 |
Chess 4.6 |
| 1980 |
Belle |
| 1983 |
Cray Blitz |
| 1986 |
Cray Blitz |
| 1989 |
Deep Thought |
| 1992 |
ChessMachine (Gideon) |
| 1995 |
Fritz |
| 1999 |
Shredder |
| 2002 |
Deep Junior |
| 2003 |
Shredder |
| 2004 |
Deep Junior |
| 2005 |
Zappa |
| 2006 |
Junior |
| 2007 |
Rybka |
| 2008 |
Rybka |
| 2009 |
Rybka |
