"That's what chess is all about. One day you give your opponent a lesson, the next day he gives you one"

Feb 11, 2011

HOUDINI world strongest chess engine

After 40 marathon match Houdini 1.5a out played Rybka 4. The time control is 150 minutes + 30 seconds added per move, for the whole game. This makes each game last an average of approximately 5 hours. If an engine loses on time for various reasons the result will stand - hence the game will not be replayed. Also noteworthy is that if the computer fails at any time during a game, that game will be restarted from the position after the opening book unless the position is won for either side, then it will be manually adjudicated by the tournament director.

Each engine is allowed to use up to ~4 GB of hash and is allowed to use up to all six cores of the processor, if this is supported. Typically all "deep" versions of engines today supports multiple threads, or cores. Pondering or "permanent brain" is not allowed so it is always disabled. An engine binary that supports the SSE 4.2 instructions, or pop_cnt, are preferred, the same applies to 64-bit binaries over 32-bit ones. Large pages are always disabled since there is not enough RAM in the computer for this to work for two engines simultaneously.

All engines are configured with the default settings, so parameters like "contempt" or similar are not adjusted. Many engines have a prefix like "deep", but this has been omitted from the engine names to make the names shorter, but the "deep" version of an engine is always used if the engine exists in this version. In general, most commercial and free engines are available.

All opening moves are randomly fetched from a PGN master file which contains 9.106 different openings that are fixed to 10 moves / 20 plies. All the openings have been automatically analyzed by a top engine on a dual-core laptop for approximately 24 seconds. Some openings are very even out of book or even slightly favoring black, but the majority of the openings are normal in the sense that white has a decent position.

As of December 17, 2010, Houdini 1.5 was ranked #1 on the leading IPON computer chess rating list, 50 Elo ahead of Rybka 4 and 100 Elo ahead of Stockfish 1.9 and Critter 0.9.


Final Standing
Name Points
Houdini 1.5a 23.5
Rybka 4 16.5

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