Stockfish

Stockfish is a free and open-source chess engine, available for various desktop and mobile platforms. It is developed by Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski, Gary Linscott and Tord Romstad, with many contributions from a community of open-source developers.

History

Stockfish originated as a fork of Tord Romstad's open-source chess engine Glaurung. The name "Stockfish" reflects its authors' Nordic heritage: it is a traditional dried white fish product and a staple food in parts of Norway.

Functionality

Stockfish uses a brute force search approach, enhanced by many sophisticated techniques such as alpha-beta pruning, bitboards, and a highly optimized evaluation function. It is universally recognized for its strength and power, consistently ranking first or near the top in most chess engine rating lists.

Features

Stockfish has many features that make it a popular choice for both casual players and professional chess analysts. It supports up to 512 CPU cores, can handle endgames with up to 7 pieces using the Syzygy endgame tablebases, and includes support for the Universal Chess Interface (UCI) and Chess Engine Communication Protocol.

Open Source

Stockfish is an open-source software, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). This means that anyone can use, copy, and modify the software free of charge, as long as they also distribute their own versions under the same license.

Usage

Stockfish is used in a variety of applications, from powering online chess platforms like lichess and chess.com, to serving as a research tool in artificial intelligence and machine learning studies. It is also used by many chess players for analysis and preparation.

See also

• Computer chess
• Chess engine
• Alpha-beta pruning
• Endgame tablebases
• Universal Chess Interface
• Open-source software