vast342 / 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 2024-01-31.

Engine Name	Author	CCRL 40/15	CCRL Blitz	Notes
Caissa 1.17	Witek902	~3601	↓3733	Written in C++!
Obsidian 1.17	gab8192	~3593	↓3733	Written in C++!
Seer 2.8.0	Connor McMonigle	3583	3716	Very strong engine, with NNUE trained via retrograde learning on tablebase positions.
Clover 6.1	lucametehau	3571	3716	Plant.
Viridithas 11.0.0	Cosmo Bobak	3496	3575	The strongest UK chess engine and in the running for the strongest Rust chess engine (curse you Black Marlin!!).
Stormphrax 4.1.0	Ciekce	↓3525	↓3643	The second strongest UK chess engine. Successor to Polaris; another NNUE engine that learnt to evaluate from zero knowledge.
Lizard 10.2	liamt19	3500	3585	Written in C#!
eepy
Carp 3.0.1	dede1751	3456	3534	Written in Rust!
akimbo 0.8.0	jw1912	3431	3544	Small engine written in Rust.
Altair 6.0.0	Antares	3427	3523	Star.
Starzix 3.0	zzzzz	3415	3514	Another C++ engine
Rice 7.0.0	Rafid	3401	3490	Written in C++
Peacekeeper 2.20	Sazgr	3386	3470	A C++ engine which formerly had simple evaluation, still sucks at LTC, and has 2.19999999 in its code.
Smallbrain 7.0.0	Disservin	3379	3458	Supports FRC & uses self-generated NNUE data.
chess.cpp 4.0	Gedas	3378	*	Very strong C++ engine, still doesn't have a proper name!!
BlackCore 6.0	Szil	3376	3447	Very strong NNUE implementation.
Clarity 4.1.0	Vast	↓3375	↓3448	Qsearch history go brrrrrr
StockDory Starfish 0.1	Shaheryar Sohail	3350	3401	C++ rewrite of StockNemo.
Willow 3.1	Adam Kulju	3340	3394	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.
Avalanche 2.1.0	Yinuo Huang	3322	3399	Strongest engine written in Zig. From China. Prioritizes bad captures over quiets...
Midnight 8	archi	3317	3389	"it be an engine" - archi
Stash 35.0	Morgan Houppin	3299	3354	Another very strong HCE engine. Doesn't support tablebases.
Frozenight 6.0.0	MinusKelvin	3277	3374	NNUE chess engine that never had an HCE, learned to play chess from zero knowledge.
Weiss 2.0	Terje	3265	3331	A very strong VICE descendant, and one of the strongest HCE engines.
Nalwald 18	tsoj	3257	3287	Alpha-beta engine with BAE, written in Nim.
Drofa 4.1.0	No4b	3251	3294	Drofa started as a fork of the Shallow Blue chess engine - it's now much stronger, and is among the strong HCE engines.
StockNemo 5.7.0.0	Shaheryar Sohail	3244	3284	Written in C#!
Svart 6	Crippa	3236	3262	Written in Rust!
Pedantic 0.6.0	JoAnnP38	3075	3076	Written in C#!
Wahoo 4.0.0	Spamdrew	3055	3079	A superhuman chess engine designed to surpass Apotheosis.
Princhess 0.15.1	princesslana	3036	3075	CPU-only MCTS engine in Rust!
4ku 4.0	kz04px, Gedas, Gian-Carlo Pascutto, and others	3026	3031	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
Polaris 1.8.1	Ciekce	2987	3051	"author has a catboy as pfp" ~ crippa C++20 HCE engine that does not care about king safety!
ice4 v4	MinusKelvin & Analog Hors	2945	*	ice4 is a chess engine which fits in 4096 bytes. Written to take part in the TCEC's 4K tournament
Renegade 0.12.0	Krisz	↓2933	3457	A chess engine written in C++ using Visual Studio 2019. It values readability and simplicity.
Leorik 2.5	lithander	2919	2918	Written in C#!
Cheers 0.3.0	Algorhythm	2866	2843	A Rust HCE engine!
Mess 0.3.0	Rak Laptudirm	2774	2782	Written in Go!
Apotheosis 4.0.1	Spamdrew	2763	2747	Apotheosis is a blunder-prone silly lil guy that sometimes plays cool chess.
Sirius 5.0	Mcthouacbb	2680	*	I will beat pesto.
Lynx 1.2.0	eduherminio	2584	↓2429	Written in C#!
Baislicka 1.0	kz04px	2154	2171	A chess engine written in C. Uses bitboards with fixed shift fancy movegen.
Valiant Mk 8	Enderjed	*	860	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 1.16	Witek902	3937
Clover 6.1	lucametehau	3904
Stormphrax 4.0.0	Ciekce	3780
Viridithas 11.0.0	Cosmo Bobak	3765
Peacekeeper 2.10	Sazgr	3685
Altair 6.0.0	Antares	3655
akimbo 0.8.0	jw1912	3621
Smallbrain 7.0.0	Disservin	3573
Frozenight 6.0.0	MinusKelvin	3532
Stash 35.0	Morgan Houppin	3434
Weiss 2.0	Terje	3397
Drofa 4.1.0	No4b	3345
Nalwald 18	tsoj	3154
Polaris 1.8.1	Ciekce	2966
Princhess 0.15.1	princesslana	↓2138

Ataxx Engines

Engine Name	Author	Notes
Autaxx	kz04px
Scarletxx	Folkert van Heusden
kZero	Karel Peeters	(see below)
Sanctaphraxx	Ciekce
Zataxx	zzzzz

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 "~".