Houdini (chess)
Houdini is a powerful computer chess engine for the Microsoft Windows operating system , which was developed by Robert Houdart ( Belgium ). It first appeared on May 15, 2010 as freeware under version number 1.0 and immediately achieved very good placements in tests. Version 1.5a from January 15, 2011 led well-known engine rankings and displaced the previously strongest engine Deep Rybka 4 from the top spot. The author explained the unusually high playing strength for a new engine on his homepage with "many ideas from the open source engines Ippolit and Stockfish ." At the beginning of September 2011, version 2.0 appeared, which has now been sold commercially. An update to Houdini 2.0b was published on October 7, 2011, version 2.0c followed on November 20, 2011. Version 3 appeared on October 15, 2012 in two versions: Standard for up to six processors and 4 GB hash tables and Pro for up to 32 processors and 256 GB hash tables. Houdini was also used as an analysis module in other applications, including Chess Assistant , Chess King and the live portal of the German Chess League . Version 4 of Houdini was released on November 25, 2013. It now also supports the Syzygy endgame database , which requires less than 150 gigabytes of storage capacity for all Sechssteiners .
The ChessBase engine has been available under the Fritz 12 interface since the end of 2012 . Instead of UCI, the manufacturer's native engine format is used as the interface .
At the 9th TCEC computer chess tournament, which was held from May to December 2016 , Robert Houdart competed in the third season with the new version Houdini 5, which was released on November 9, 2016. Version 6 was released on September 15, 2017.
Technical
In addition to the usual basic functions, Houdini has the following features:
- UCI, the Universal Chess Interface . This means that the engine can be used under numerous program interfaces.
- Multivariate analysis mode
- dynamic access to endgame databases in Gaviota format (from version 1.5) or in Nalimov format (from version 2.0b)
- 32-bit and 64-bit operation; two different executables are supplied for this.
- Multiprocessor operation ( SMP ), depending on the version for up to 6, 8 or up to 128 CPUs or cores.
- since version 2: support for Chess960