This has resulted in TCEC revoking Houdini's championship results, and disallowing Houdini from competing. Houdini 6 has been alleged to be a Stockfish 8 derivative without providing the sources on request, and thus, violating the GPL license. Houdini used to be one of the most successful engines in TCEC, with three championship wins to date, but since season 18 it no longer participates in TCEC due to it allegedly containing plagiarized code (see Controversy). Houdini 5 uses calibrated evaluations in which engine scores correlate directly with the win expectancy in the position. As with many other UCI engines, Houdini comes with no GUI, so a chess GUI is needed for running the engine. 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. The latest stable release of Houdini comes in two versions: Houdini 6 Standard and Houdini 6 Pro.

Maintenance update with Polyglot book support.Ĭorrection for incorrect detection of stalemate in positions with white pawn capture moves. Maintenance update with Nalimov EGTB correction and new output option. Improved search and evaluation (+50-60 Elo), enhanced multi-threading. Maintenance update with some interface corrections and improvements. Rewritten evaluation function, deeper search. Major new version, about 200 Elo stronger. Improved search and evaluation (+50 Elo), 6-men Syzygy table bases (coding provided by Ronald de Man) Improved search and evaluation (+50 Elo), Tactical Mode, Scorpio bitbases, accelerated Principal Variation Search 'Smart Fail-High', optimized hash usage. UCI_Elo and UCI_LimitStrength options as UCI standard-compliant alternative to Strength option. FiftyMoveDistance option to make the 50-move rule kick in earlier. MultiPV_cp option to limit multi-PV analysis to moves within a range of the best move. Maintenance update with minor bug corrections and new analysis options. Maintenance update with minor bug corrections and Nalimov EGTB support. Save hash to file, load hash from file, never clear hash. Houdini Pro version for high-end users with powerful hardware (multi-core support). Improved analysis capabilities, enhanced search and evaluation. Maintenance update with work-arounds for Fritz GUI and other minor improvements.įirst commercial release. Multi-PV, searchmove and large page support. 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'. 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.

Houdini 6 chess engine uci