Critter (chess)

Critter is a non-commercial chess program, which is one of the strongest in the game world.

It is written by the Slovak software developer Richard Vida ( b. 1977 ). It was originally written in Object Pascal. Since ill-adapted proved that language for a chess program, it is developed in C since 2009. Critter bitboards and used standard techniques such as alpha-beta search, pruning and train zero - search. By his own admission Vida has examined the code of the open source program Ippolit and taken some promising ideas from it. Since version 0.60 (April 2010) are multiprocessor systems with up to 8 threads, since version 0.70 ( May 2010) also supports Gaviota tablebases. Critter does not have its own Chess frontend and uses the UCI protocol. There are versions for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Android. In computer chess rankings Critter lies behind the leader Houdini and about on par with Rybka and Stockfish. At the tournament ICT12 the Dutch Computer Chess organization CSVN Critter took 2nd place behind a cluster version of Rybka.