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Traditionally, the term chess engine referred to a chess playing program that did not have its own user interface.Typically they ran on user interfaces such as XBoard on Linux or WinBoard on Windows.

Nowadays, many commercial engines, historically sold tightly integrated with their own interface, now allow additional engines to be loaded. Popular examples include the Chessmaster and Chessbase family of engines.

The command line interface of GNU Chess became the initial de facto standard, first supported by XBoard. There is now a newer protocol, the Universal Chess Interface.

Many engines support both protocols. Both protocols have their supporters, although Universal Chess Interface has an edge on usability for end-users.

UCI (= Universal Chess Interface)
This is the description of a new interface between a chess engine and a graphical user interface called UCI. It was designed by Rudolf Huber and Stefan Meyer-Kahlen and is used in the chess engines SOS and Shredder as well as in the Shredder graphical user interface. The UCI interface is free to use for everyone, so you can use it in your own program without any licence fees or restrictions. If you make any additions or modifications to the interface it might be a good idea to contact me before so we can keep compatibility.

The interface is similar to Winboard, keeping its easiness but eliminating the disadvantages of it. It should be not much work to adept an chess engine to UCI especially if it’s already supporting winboard. It is also possible to support both UCI and winboard in the same exe file.

Increasing strength

Chess engines increase in playing strength each year. This is partly due to the increase in processing power that enables calculations to be made to ever greater depths in a given time. In addition, programming techniques have improved enabling the engines to be more selective in the lines that they analyse and to acquire a better positional understanding.

Some chess engines use endgame tablebases to increase their playing strength during the endgame. An endgame tablebase is a database of all possible endgame positions with small groups of material. Each position is conclusively determined as a win, loss, or draw for the player whose turn it is to move, and the number of moves to the end with best play by both sides. Endgame tablebases in all cases identify the absolute best move in all positions included (identifying the move that wins fastest against perfect defense, or the move that loses slowest against optimal opposition). Such tablebases are available for all 3-6 man positions (counting the kings) and some 7-man combinations. When the manoeuvering in an ending to achieve an irreversible improvement takes more moves than the horizon of calculation of a chess engine, an engine is not guaranteed to find the best move without the use of an endgame tablebase, and in many cases can fall foul of the 50 move rule etc. as a result. Some experts have pointed out the potential for faulty use of endgame tablebases by programmers, leading to worse play

Tournaments
The results of computer tournaments such as the World Computer Chess Championship give one view of the relative strengths of chess engines. However, tournaments do not play a statistically significant number of games for accurate strength determination. Most tournaments also allow any types of hardware, so only engine/hardware combinations are being compared.

Historically, commercial programs have been the strongest engines. The 2006 WCCC was won by Junior. The top four programs were commercial engines but Spike, a freely available engine, finished joint 5th. [2] To some extent, this is a self-fulfulling prophesy; if an amateur engine wins a tournament or otherwise performs well (for example, Zappa in 2005), then it is quickly commercialized.

Chess engine rating lists
Chess engine rating lists aim to provide statistically significant measures of relative engine strength. These lists play multiple games between engines on standard hardware platforms, so that results are statistically significant and processor differences are factored out. These lists not only provide a ranking, but also margins of error on the given ratings. Also rating lists typically play games continuously, publishing many updates per year, compared to tournaments which only take place annually.he Elo management in our chess program was implemented mainly in order to evaluate engine tournaments.

The Elo management in our chess program was implemented mainly in order to evaluate engine tournaments. But it is very interesting to use it on human results as well. It can also be quite exciting to create Elo lists for historical game data. For the system to work properly, it is absolutely critical that the players? names are completely unified. We recommend using the large high-quality databases from ChessBase (e.g., MegaDatabase) for the creation of historical Elo lists. Most other databases contain player names with different spellings and other inaccuracies. In addition, databases which do not contain complete tournaments will distort the ratings. For instance if they only have the best games of certain players these players will achieve very high ratings from the program.

For engine ratings, a good Elo list should be based on at least 300 to 500 games. Implausible values in the start list are not a big problem, because after a few engine tournaments, the programs will approach their real ratings (underrated engines will shoot up, grossly overrated ones will lose point very quickly).

Commercial programs
These chess programs are sold commercially. Most of these also include their own user interface.

Chess Genius, by Richard Lang of Mephisto fame -Chessmaster -Chess Tiger -Diep -Fritz (single processor)A very strong new version of the program that held classical chess world champion Vladimir Kramnik to a 4:4 draw in Bahrain in October 2002, and drew against Garry Kasparov in New York in 2003. Fritz 10 has a large amount of chess knowledge, which enables it to find good plans and ideas even in positions where there are no tactical opportunities. The authors are Frans Morsch (Holland) and Mathias Feist (Germany)., Deep Fritz (multi processor) -Gandalf - HIARCS -The King - the engine of the commercial Chessmaster program -Junior - (single- and multi-processor versions) The many times computer chess world champion, which played to a draw against Garry Kasparov in New York in 2003. Authors: Amir Ban., Shay Bushinsky -Ktulu -Loop & List - NIMZO -Naum versions 2.1 and later -Rebel - (see also ProDeo) -Ruffian 2 -Rybka -Shredder Winner of a large number of world championship titles. Author: Stefan Meyer-Kahlen (Germany). - Sjeng -Smarthink -Zappa

Personal programs
These programs are personal or research projects which may have competed in tournaments on the Internet Chess Club or on the Free Internet Chess Server, but are otherwise unavailable to the public.

Diep - Falcon - Ferret - LearningLemming - Weid