Download Houdini Chess Engine !!EXCLUSIVE!!

There are many strong chess engines these days, but Houdini has been one of the strongest engines over the past decade. It was the top chess entity on the planet for some time, defeating its contemporaries like Rybka, Stockfish, and Komodo. Let's learn more about this powerful engine.

Houdini is a commercial chess engine, meaning that it can be purchased and used by anyone. The engine was developed by the Belgian chess player and programmer Robert Houdart in 2010. It is one of the strongest chess engines and was the fourth highest-rated engine in late 2019 (behind Stockfish, Leela Chess Zero, and Komodo).

Download Houdini Chess Engine

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According to Houdini's website, it is "widely considered to be the strongest chess engine money can buy." This statement may be true, especially considering that Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero are free, open-source engines. (Komodo was also open source for a long time before becoming commercial more recently.) Houdini is not the most accessible engine since it can only be used on Windows.

Houdini burst onto the scene in 2010 by winning the first and second TCEC seasons in 2010 and 2011, respectively, ahead of Rybka and other top engines. It also won the fourth TCEC season (the third season was never completed) in 2013 ahead of Stockfish.

You now know what Houdini is, why it is considered one of the best chess engines in the world, and more. Head over to Chess.com/ccc and watch top engines battle for the Computer Chess Championship at any time on any day!

It's not so difficult to beat Houdini in correspondence chess. Computers still lack certain elements of positional understanding, and they can certainly be outplayed by a strong player. On rapid/blitz games though, it is a totally different story.

I'd be kind of surprised if humans do better in correspondence chess against a computer than in a 'normal' timed (but not rapid/blitz) game, because it can spend every second calculating (unless restricted in some way) whereas a human has the matter of life to attend to.

Local expert who is ~2400 USCF correspondence talks about how easy it is to beat the idiots who take Houdini or Rybkas top few moves and only ever play them. Correspondence chess is a totally different matter.

Correspondence chess is not really typical chess, since as IM pfren pointed out, the humans can use computers to help them anyway so I don't see how you can tell if humans can beat engines in correspondence chess.

It could be that engines have a few key weaknesses, and GMs are really good at filling in the gaps here, but at the same time engines are so strong that, even with these weaknesses, they can beat any human player.

p.s. I'm willing to back up my assertion.... how about this: I play you (pfren) two games of centaur chess, in which we both use computers. I'm a patzer compared to you OTB but suspect my rig (hardware/software) is superior. Bet you don't even come close to winning a game. Not even close.

Bear in mind it also must store its computational results somewhere, since what is the best move in a 10 move horizon may or may not be the best in a 12 move horizon. And since we are talking about a 64 move horizon, that will be untold trillions and trillion and trillions of positions to store as it tries to tally up the best move. I cannot imagine the size of hard drive needed for this, but since the estimated number of possible games of chess is larger than the number of particles in the known universe, we may have to look outside our universe to find enough raw materials to build this hard drive.

Most of you seem to massively overestimate the abilities of chess engines. You treat them like chess gods. In the ICCF, all of the good players play as centaurs, not just engines, and with good reason. Prawn, you say that you could be pfren in a centaur match. I highly doubt this. Centaurs > computers, and the greater player will be able to use the engine more effectively, and make know when and when not to trust the engines evaluations.

What is disputed is whether a GM without the aid of a computer beats today's engines like Houdini. Common sense tells me this: Kasparov lost >15 years ago his match against Deepl Blue 2. Deep Blue 2 would be thrashed by today's engines. Ergo: GM's don't stand much of a chance against today's engines.

Houdini is a UCI chess engine developed by Belgian programmer Robert Houdart. It is influenced by open-source engines IPPOLIT/RobboLito, Stockfish, and Crafty. Versions up to 1.5a are available for non-commercial use, while 2.0 and later are commercial only.

Chess commentator and video annotator CM Tryfon Gavriel compared Houdini's playing style to that of the Romantic Era of chess, where an attacking, sacrificial style was predominant.[1] According to Robert Houdart, Houdini's advantage against other top engines is in its handling of piece mobility, which is why it "favors aggressive play that tries to win the game".[2]

The latest stable release of Houdini comes in two versions: Houdini 6 Standard and Houdini 6 Pro. Houdini 6 Pro supports up to 128 processor cores, 128 GB of RAM (hash) and is NUMA-aware, Houdini 5 Standard only supports up to 8 processor cores, 4 GB of hash and is not NUMA-aware. As with many other UCI engines, Houdini comes with no GUI, so a chess GUI is needed for running the engine. Houdini 5 uses calibrated evaluations in which engine scores correlate directly with the win expectancy in the position.[3]

Houdini used to be one of the most successful engines in TCEC, with three championship wins to date,[10][11] but since season 18 it no longer participates in TCEC due to plagiarized code (see Controversies).

"Welcome to the Houdini Chess Engine home page." You could read this sentence for the first time in May 2010, when the programmer Robert Houdart offered the first version of his new chess program for free download. At that time nobody could have guessed that only seven months later Houdini would replace Rybka as No. 1 in the world and dominate computer chess for several years. How strong was Houdini 1 and what were its special qualities? How was the program improved and what makes it especially valuable for chess analysis? On the occasion of the tenth anniversary I would like to answer these questions and of course also look at Houdini's performance in computer tournaments.

These are quite remarkable abilities which, what about chess is concerned, you can very well find in the engine named after Houdini. This is not a surprise, because without inventive defensive faculties no chess player can make it to the top of the world. The world champions Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Petrosian and Karpov, among others, were considered to be particularly tough defenders.

Since I could not find Houdini 1 in any rating list, I conducted a small test match over 20 games between the first Houdini version from May 2010 and the chess program Critter 0.90 by the Slovakian programmer Richard Vida which was published half a year later. I used the CCRL standard time control of 4 minutes for 40 moves (64-bit, 1CPU) which was usual until 2019. The final result was 5-3 with 12 draws in favour of Houdini 1. Since Critter 0.90 64-bit has an ELO rating of 3049 in the CCRL 40/4 list, the corresponding ELO rating of Houdini 1 is somewhere around 3083. This is in the range of Rybka 3's rating of 3078 ELO. Of course, significantly more test games should have been played, but a few ELO up or down are not important here. I just wanted to check if the first version of Houdini already had a remarkable strength. The small test match against Critter confirmed this assumption.

Regarding the origins of the program, it is rumored that Robert Houdart took the free public domain engine RobboLito as a basis. He himself stated on his homepage that he used many ideas from the free open source programs IPPOLIT/RobboLito, Stockfish and Crafty. (c) This probably explains the very high playing strength right from the beginning. In fact Robert Houdart did much more than using ideas of others. He added a lot of improvements to his new brainchild as you can easily see for yourself with the help of a little test:

This position was given by correspondence chess grandmaster Arno Nickel. (d) RobboLito 0.085g3 will show you a score of + 4.26 in favour of White (38 plies search depth), while Houdini 1 immediately recognizes that this position is balanced (+ 0.03). This is quite correct, because Black need not care about his pawns on the King's side at all. By simply moving his King via b5, c6 and d7 to c8, he can easily prevent White from winning the game. Try it out and you'll see that White will never get beyond a stalemate. This example proves that even the very first version of Houdini from May 2010 was able to master this difficult endgame without using any tablebases.

Robert Houdart was born in 1968. He is a computer scientist and professional software developer with a FIDE ELO rating of 2101. (e) These are good qualifications to optimize a chess program more and more. The constant ongoing development of Houdini 1 soon paid off: Houdini 1.03a, released two months later in July 2010, had an ELO rating of 3116 ELO in the CCRL 40/4 list (64-bit, 1CPU). The last free Houdini version 1.5a from January 2011 gained 54 more ELO points and thus reached 3170. For comparison: The strongest Rybka version 4.1 had an ELO rating of 3108, while the commercial Houdini versions 2, 3 and 4 climbed up to 3202, 3217 and 3240 ELO. In the three and a half years between May 2010 (Houdini 1) and November 2013 (Houdini 4) Robert Houdart was thus able to improve Houdini from about 3083 ELO to 3240 ELO (64-bit, 1CPU). This is a plus of almost 160 ELO. Running on four processors (4CPU) Houdini 4 even reached 3332 ELO. (f)

Besides an increase in playing strength, Robert Houdart added several additional features to his program. With Houdini 1 you could already set the number of threads, the so-called split depth (search depth, from which the calculations run over two or more processors), ponder (calculating while the opponent has to move) and how much hash size the engine may use. In the following versions more options were added gradually. Since Houdini 1.03 the engine can display several variations at the same time when analyzing positions (Multi-PV). With version 1.5 endgame tablebases were included. Robert Houdart also added a so-called contempt factor to his program to avoid unnecessary draws against weaker opponents. In spite of a slightly worse position Houdini from now on played on against weaker opponents, which naturally lead to a lower draw rate. Contempt is deactivated by default during analysis. This is important to obtain an objective evaluation of the position. In the realm of computer chess all of these improvements pushed the program to the top of the world in just seven months. e24fc04721