Houdini (chess)

Houdini is a strong virtual chess engine for the Microsoft Windows operating system, which was developed by Robert Houdart (Belgium ). It first appeared on 15 May 2010 as freeware under the version number 1.0 and immediately achieved very good results in tests. Version 1.5a of January 15, 2011 leads to well-known engine rankings, and thus has the strongest engine Deep Rybka 4 previously ousted from top spot. The author explains that for a new engine unusually high skill level on his website with " many ideas from the open source engines Ippolit and stockfish. " Early September 2011, Version 2.0 was released, which is now sold commercially. An update on Houdini 2.0b was released on October 7, 2011, version 2.0c followed on November 20, 2011 Version 3 was released on October 15, 2012 There are two variants: .. Standard for up to six processors and 4 GB of hash tables and Pro for up to 32 processors and 256 GB of hash tables. Houdini is also used as an analysis module in other applications, including Chess Assistant, Chess King and the Live Portal Chess League. Version 4 of Houdini was published on 25 November 2013. It now supports the Syzygy - endgame database, which requires less than 150 gigabytes of storage capacity for all six Steiner.

From the end of 2012, the engine of ChessBase below the surface of Fritz 12 is available. The interface then comes the UCI instead of the manufacturer Native Engine format used.

Technical

Houdini has besides usual basic functions the following features:

  • UCI, the Universal Chess Interface. Thus, the engine under various program interfaces is available.
  • Multivariate analysis mode
  • Dynamic access to endgame databases Gaviota format ( version 1.5 ) or in Nalimov format ( since version 2.0b )
  • 32 -bit and 64-bit operation; for this purpose two different executables are supplied.
  • Multiprocessing ( SMP), depending on the version for up to 6, 8 or 32 CPUs or cores.
  • Since version 2: support for Chess960
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