sazgr / engine-list

The Engine Programming Server's List of Game-Playing Engines

Chess Engines

"*" ratings indicate a missing rating from the rating lists.

"~" prefix indicates that a rating is merely approximate.

"↓" prefix indicates that the rating was obtained with an older release of the engine.

All ratings are from single-CPU lists, last updated 2023-09-07.

Engine Name	Author	CCRL 40/15	CCRL Blitz	Notes
Clover 6.0	lucametehau	3423	3599	Plant.
Caissa 1.12	Witek902	↓3410	↓3570	Written in C++!
Seer 2.6.0	Connor McMonigle	3401	3546	Very strong engine, with NNUE trained via retrograde learning on tablebase positions.
Viridithas 10.0.0	Cosmo Bobak	3383	3527	The strongest UK chess engine and in the running for the strongest Rust chess engine (curse you Black Marlin!!).
chess.cpp 3.99	Gedas	~3350	*	Very strong C++ engine, still doesn't have a proper name!!
Rice 7.0.0	Rafid	3327	3472	Written in C++
BlackCore 6.0	Szil	3309	3427	Very strong NNUE implementation.
Smallbrain 7.0.0	Disservin	3305	3434	Supports FRC & uses self-generated NNUE data.
StockDory Starfish 0.1	Shaheryar Sohail	3276	3380	C++ rewrite of StockNemo.
Stormphrax 1.0.0	Ciekce	3254	3359	Successor to Polaris; another NNUE engine that learnt to evaluate from zero knowledge.
Frozenight 6.0.0	MinusKelvin	3219	3364	NNUE chess engine that never had an HCE, learned to play chess from zero knowledge.
Stash 34.0	Morgan Houppin	3214	3312	Another very strong HCE engine. Doesn't support tablebases.
Weiss 2.0	Terje	3208	3316	A very strong VICE descendant, and one of the strongest HCE engines.
Drofa 4.0.0	No4b	3178	3249	Drofa started as a fork of the Shallow Blue chess engine - it's now much stronger, and is among the strong HCE engines.
StockNemo Stingray 5.7.0.0	Shaheryar Sohail	3189	↓2935	Written in C#!
Svart 6	Crippa	↓3173	↓3255	Written in Rust!
Willow 3.0	Adam Kulju	3164	3245	The world's strongest mailbox engine. It features a net that is trained on games with intentional mistakes, to increase strength and foster an aggressive style of play... or that's the hope, at least.
Nalwald 18	tsoj	↓3142	3273	Alpha-beta engine with BAE, written in Nim.
Carp 2.0.0	dede1751	3086	3161	Written in Rust!
Altair 4.0.0	Antares	3041	3085	10x12 mailbox C++ engine.
Midnight v7	archi	3012	3113	"it be an engine" - archi
Polaris 1.8.1	Ciekce	2984	3058	"author has a catboy as pfp" ~ crippa C++20 HCE engine that does not care about king safety!
Peacekeeper 1.71	Sazgr	↓2977	3096	A C++ engine which formerly had simple evaluation, still sucks at LTC, and has 2.19999999 in its code.
Wahoo 4.0.0	Spamdrew	↓2863	3068	A superhuman chess engine designed to surpass Apotheosis.
4ku 3.1	kz04px, Gedas, Gian-Carlo Pascutto, and others	↓2808	↓2919	A UCI chess engine in 4 kB. The 4ku-mini script contains compressed C++ source code, that is extracted and compiled before being run. Written to take part in the TCEC's 4K tournament
ice4 v3.1	MinusKelvin & Analog Hors	↓2755	*	ice4 is a chess engine which fits in 4096 bytes. Written to take part in the TCEC's 4K tournament
Akimbo 0.5.0	JacquesRW	↓2724	3069	Small engine written in Rust.
Pedantic 0.4.1	JoAnnP38	2860	2882	Written in C#!
Mess 0.3.0	Rak Laptudirm	2764	2814	Written in Go!
Apotheosis 4.0.1	Spamdrew	2743	2782	Apotheosis is a blunder-prone silly lil guy that sometimes plays cool chess.
Princhess 0.12.0	princesslana	2713	2791	CPU-only MCTS engine in Rust!
Renegade 0.11.0	Krisz	2698	2729	A chess engine written in C++ using Visual Studio 2019. It values readability and simplicity.
Cheers 0.2.2	Algorhythm	2639	↓2658	A Rust HCE engine!
Baislicka 1.0	kz04px	2208	2254	A chess engine written in C. Uses bitboards with fixed shift fancy movegen.
Valiant Mk 8	Enderjed	*	1039	Mk V has a startup sound, Mk 3.2 "Archer" has reversed piece square tables, Mk 2 "Valentine" barely cares about king safety, Mk2 and Mk3's sources are lost to time... Its greatest anomaly is being able to consistently beat BBC 1.4 (with Stockfish NNUE!). The 3rd strongest python engine.

Chess960 Engines

See above for notes.

Engine Name	Author	CCRL 40/2 FRC
Caissa 1.12	Witek902	3822
Clover 6.0	lucametehau	3820
Viridithas 10.0.0	Cosmo Bobak	3674
Smallbrain 7.0.0	Disservin	3542
Stormphrax 1.0.0	Ciekce	3513
Frozenight 6.0.0	MinusKelvin	3502
Weiss 2.0	Terje	3375
Stash 34.0	Morgan Houppin	3359
Drofa 4.0.0	No4b	3259
Nalwald 18	tsoj	3144
Altair 4.0.0	Antares	3076
Polaris 1.8.1	Ciekce	2972
Akimbo 0.3.0	JacquesRW	↓2313
Princhess 0.12.0	princesslana	↓2189

Ataxx Engines

Engine Name	Author	Notes
Scarletxx	Folkert van Heusden
kZero	Karel Peeters	(see below)

GGPs & Other Game Engines

Engine Name	Author	Game	Notes
Ampersand	Corman	GGP (Fairy Chess)	Ampersand is a fairy chess engine powered by the monster-chess move generation library. It currently isn't functional.
bashtet	Analog Hors	Tetris	A bash script that plays Tetris.
Cold Clear	MinusKelvin	Tetris	The strongest Tetris engine as of the last time anyone bothered to check.
Della Baduck	Folkert van Heusden	Go
kZero	Karel Peeters	Chess, Go, Ataxx	An AlphaZero implementation in Rust and Python. Easily adaptable to different games.

Contributing

• Engines are sorted in descending order of their CCRL 40/15 rating, or their CCRL 40/2 FRC rating for Chess960.
• If you are:
  • Updating the version-number of an existing engine, but you lack a rating for it, prefix the earlier rating with an "↓".
  • Updating/adding an engine and the error margins of a rating is >30, prefix the rating with an "~".