The Engine Programming Server's List of Game-Playing 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 2023-12-23.
| Engine Name | Author | CCRL 40/15 | CCRL Blitz | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Caissa 1.15 | Witek902 | 3447 | 3617 | Written in C++! |
| Clover 6.1 | lucametehau | 3440 | ↓3597 | Plant. |
| Seer 2.7.0 | Connor McMonigle | 3424 | 3580 | Very strong engine, with NNUE trained via retrograde learning on tablebase positions. |
| Viridithas 11.0.0 | Cosmo Bobak | 3407 | 3544 | The strongest UK chess engine and in the running for the strongest Rust chess engine (curse you Black Marlin!!). |
| Stormphrax 4.0.0 | Ciekce | ~3402 | 3543 | The second strongest UK chess engine. Successor to Polaris; another NNUE engine that learnt to evaluate from zero knowledge. |
| Carp 3.0.1 | dede1751 | 3376 | 3506 | Written in Rust! |
| Altair 6.0.0 | Antares | 3349 | 3500 | 10x12 mailbox C++ engine. |
| z5 3.0 | zzzzz | 3344 | 3488 | Another C++ engine |
| Rice 7.0.0 | Rafid | 3328 | 3470 | Written in C++ |
| akimbo 0.7.0 | jw1912 | 3314 | 3460 | Small engine written in Rust. |
| Smallbrain 7.0.0 | Disservin | 3308 | 3435 | Supports FRC & uses self-generated NNUE data. |
| BlackCore 6.0 | Szil | 3308 | 3426 | Very strong NNUE implementation. |
| chess.cpp 4.0 | Gedas | 3308 | * | Very strong C++ engine, still doesn't have a proper name!! |
| StockDory Starfish 0.1 | Shaheryar Sohail | 3284 | 3380 | C++ rewrite of StockNemo. |
| Willow 3.1 | Adam Kulju | 3276 | 3385 | 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. |
| Peacekeeper 2.10 | Sazgr | 3266 | 3377 | A C++ engine which formerly had simple evaluation, still sucks at LTC, and has 2.19999999 in its code. |
| Midnight 8 | archi | 3257 | 3373 | "it be an engine" - archi |
| Avalanche 2.0.0 | Yinuo Huang | 3247 | 3331 | Strongest engine written in Zig. From China. Prioritizes bad captures over quiets... |
| Stash 35.0 | Morgan Houppin | 3235 | 3341 | Another very strong HCE engine. Doesn't support tablebases. |
| Frozenight 6.0.0 | MinusKelvin | 3218 | 3360 | NNUE chess engine that never had an HCE, learned to play chess from zero knowledge. |
| Weiss 2.0 | Terje | 3207 | 3319 | A very strong VICE descendant, and one of the strongest HCE engines. |
| Nalwald 18 | tsoj | 3201 | 3279 | Alpha-beta engine with BAE, written in Nim. |
| StockNemo 5.7.0.0 | Shaheryar Sohail | 3189 | 3277 | Written in C#! |
| Svart 6 | Crippa | 3181 | 3256 | Written in Rust! |
| Drofa 4.1.0 | No4b | ↓3178 | 3282 | Drofa started as a fork of the Shallow Blue chess engine - it's now much stronger, and is among the strong HCE engines. |
| Pedantic 0.6.0 | JoAnnP38 | 3036 | 3091 | Written in C#! |
| Wahoo 4.0.0 | Spamdrew | 3014 | 3087 | A superhuman chess engine designed to surpass Apotheosis. |
| Polaris 1.8.1 | Ciekce | 2987 | 3061 | "author has a catboy as pfp" ~ crippa C++20 HCE engine that does not care about king safety! |
| Princhess 0.15.1 | princesslana | ↓2927 | 3072 | CPU-only MCTS engine in Rust! |
| Renegade 0.12.0 | Krisz | 2908 | 2961 | A chess engine written in C++ using Visual Studio 2019. It values readability and simplicity. |
| Leorik 2.5 | lithander | 2899 | 2941 | Written in C#! |
| 4ku 3.1 | kz04px, Gedas, Gian-Carlo Pascutto, and others | 2857 | ↓2920 | 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 |
| Cheers 0.3.0 | Algorhythm | ~2849 | 2873 | A Rust HCE engine! |
| ice4 v3.1 | MinusKelvin & Analog Hors | 2817 | * | ice4 is a chess engine which fits in 4096 bytes. Written to take part in the TCEC's 4K tournament |
| Mess 0.3.0 | Rak Laptudirm | 2764 | 2817 | Written in Go! |
| Apotheosis 4.0.1 | Spamdrew | 2745 | 2786 | Apotheosis is a blunder-prone silly lil guy that sometimes plays cool chess. |
| Baislicka 1.0 | kz04px | 2207 | 2254 | A chess engine written in C. Uses bitboards with fixed shift fancy movegen. |
| Valiant Mk 8 | Enderjed | * | 1040 | 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. |
See above for notes.
| Engine Name | Author | CCRL 40/2 FRC |
|---|---|---|
| Caissa 1.15 | Witek902 | 3882 |
| Clover 6.1 | lucametehau | 3861 |
| Stormphrax 4.0.0 | Ciekce | 3745 |
| Viridithas 11.0.0 | Cosmo Bobak | 3726 |
| Altair 6.0.0 | Antares | 3617 |
| Peacekeeper 2.10 | Sazgr | 3568 |
| Smallbrain 7.0.0 | Disservin | 3543 |
| Frozenight 6.0.0 | MinusKelvin | 3503 |
| akimbo 0.7.0 | jw1912 | 3502 |
| Stash 35.0 | Morgan Houppin | 3414 |
| Weiss 2.0 | Terje | 3375 |
| Drofa 4.1.0 | No4b | ↓3260 |
| Nalwald 18 | tsoj | 3145 |
| Polaris 1.8.1 | Ciekce | 2968 |
| Princhess 0.15.1 | princesslana | ↓2191 |
| Engine Name | Author | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Autaxx | kz04px | |
| Scarletxx | Folkert van Heusden | |
| kZero | Karel Peeters | (see below) |
| Sanctaphraxx | Ciekce | |
| Zataxx | zzzzz |
| 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. |
- 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 "~".