Chess Links
There are lots of freeware chess programs available on the Net. Many of these do not have their own user interface but instead work with separate interface programs such as Winboard or xboard. For a big list of available programs, see Leo Dijksman's excellent WBEC web site or the Computer Chess Wiki.
Following are some links to free chess engines I'm especially familiar with, and recommend. All of these play a decent game of chess. Stockfish is the strongest of these.
| Andscacs | The Baron | Crafty | EXchess |
| Fruit | Gaviota | Gull | iCE Chess |
| Nemorino | Pedone | Slow Chess Blitz | Stockfish |
The following strong chess engines are now commercial, but have earlier free versions still available:
| Rybka: | free | commercial |
| Houdini: | free | commercial |
Some chess tools I use regularly include ChessBase, pgn-extract, epd2wb, PolyGlot, cutechess-cli, BayesElo and Python Chess.
Good general chess sites I like include TWIC (The Week in Chess) and chesspublishing.com.
If you want more info about chess programming, you can look at the Arasan Programmer's Guide, and also at the following sites:
- Wikipedia Computer Chess entry
- Chess Programming Wiki
- Programming Topics (Bruce Moreland)
- Programmer Stuff (Ed Schröder)
- Chess Programming Theory (Colin Frayn)
- Computer Chess Forum
- International Computer Games Association (ICGA)
Also check out ERIC, a robot that plays chess using a modified version of Arasan!