It is readily available on many platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iOS, and Android. Image: Stockfishchess.org. Stockfish's accomplishments are more impressive than those of any other chess engine. It has won eight Top Chess Engine Championships (TCEC) through 2020.
LibriVox is a hope, an experiment, and a question: can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting?
LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.
See also: How To Get LibriVox Audio Files
LibriVox volunteers narrate, proof listen, and upload chapters of books and other textual works in the public domain. These projects are then made available on the Internet for everyone to enjoy, for free.
There are many, many things you can do to help, so please feel free to jump into the Forum and ask what you can do to help!
See also: How LibriVox Works
Most of what you need to know about LibriVox can be found on the LibriVox Forum and the FAQ. LibriVox volunteers are helpful and friendly, and if you post a question anywhere on the forum you are likely to get an answer from someone, somewhere within an hour or so. So don't be shy! Many of our volunteers have never recorded anything before LibriVox.
We have three main types of projects:
Not all volunteers read for LibriVox. If you would prefer not to lend your voice to LibriVox, you could lend us your ears. Proof listeners catch mistakes we may have missed during the initial recording and editing process.
Readers record themselves reading a section of a book, edit the recording, and upload it to the LibriVox Management Tool.
For an outline of the Librivox audiobook production process, please see The LibriVox recording process.
We require new readers to submit a sample recording so that we can make sure that your set up works and that you understand how to export files meeting our technical standards. We do not want you to waste previous hours reading whole chapters only to discover that your recording is unusable due to a preventable technical glitch.
A book coordinator (commonly abbreviated BC in the forum) is a volunteer who manages all the other volunteers who will record chapters for a LibriVox recording.
Metadata coordinators (MCs), help and advise Book Coordinators, and take over the files with the completed recordings (soloists are also Book Coordinators in this sense, as they prepare their own files for the Meta coordinators). The files are then prepared and uploaded to the LibriVox catalogue, in a lengthy and cumbersome process.
More info:
Volunteer graphic artists create the album cover art images shown in the catalog.
Resources
NOTE: Anyone may read this Wiki, but if you wish to edit the pages, please log in, as this Wiki has been locked to avoid spam. Apologies for the inconvenience.
It's 1997, and the world watches in disbelief as GM Garry Kasparov, arguably the best chess player in history, loses a match against a computer. The era of chess engines has started, changing the game's landscape forever.
Here is what you need to know about chess engines:
A chess engine is a computer program that analyzes chess positions and returns what it calculates to be the best move options. If computers were chess players, engines would be their brains. Chess.com, for instance, allows users to play against computer personalities using the Komodo engine and uses Stockfish in the Analysis Board.
Chess engines are much stronger than humans, with the best of them reaching an estimated Elo rating of more than 3000. Engines are also getting stronger each year due to improvements in hardware and software. AlphaZero, for instance, introduced the concept of neural networks to the chess world. All the most potent engines have adopted this kind of information processing tool and become even more powerful.
Here is a video of the strongest computer chess engines over time:
Many chess engines are available, but only a few of them continuously appear on the top ranks of computer championships. Here is a list of the most popular engines.
AlphaZero was developed by DeepMind, an artificial intelligence and research company that was later acquired by Google. It was the first engine to use reinforcement learning and self-play to train its neural networks.
AlphaZero shocked the world after easily defeating Stockfish—the strongest engine at the time—in a 100-game match.
Stockfish is currently the strongest chess engine available to the public. As an open-source engine, an entire community of people is helping to develop and improve it. Like many others, Stockfish has included neural networks in its code to make even better evaluations of chess positions.
Stockfish is available to the public on all major platforms like Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iOS, and Android.
Here's a video of NM Sam Copeland going over a gorgeous victory by Stockfish NNUE (now incorporated into Stockfish) over none other than Leela Chess Zero.
Leela Chess Zero is currently the second strongest publicly available chess engine. The engine (which also goes by the names Lc0, LCZero, and Leela) is part of an open-source neural network project started in 2018.
Lc0 is inspired by DeepMind's AlphaZero project and has learned the game through reinforcement learning and repeated self-play.
Here's a video of IM Danny Rensch analyzing one of Leela's masterpieces:
Komodo is one of the dominant and most successful Universal Chess Interface chess engines on the market. Don Dailey developed it in 2010, and Mark Lefler kept working on it in 2013. The engine also has counted on the support of GM Larry Kaufmann for many years to improve its playing skills.
Chess.com acquired Komodo in 2018 and uses it on our Play Computer page. The engine's ability to run at different playing strengths, with different styles and opening books, has made it a popular choice among players.
Give Komodo a go and try playing against one of its different personalities available here on Chess.com!
Deep Blue was a chess computer created by IBM as part of a publicity stunt. The company wanted to display its computer's processing power and arranged a match against Kasparov, the world champion at the time.
Deep Blue played two matches against Kasparov, one in 1996 and another in 1997. Deep Blue lost the first match but defeated the world champion the next year, causing an uproar of mixed emotions. While many people marveled at the power of technology, it was the first time a computer ever put human superiority over machines in check.
Shredder is a commercial chess engine that can be purchased by anyone. Stefan Meyer-Kahlen created the engine and user interface in Germany in 1993.
Shredder is available on multiple platforms, like Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android, iOS, and even on Amazon Kindle.
Fritz, another commercial chess program, was developed by Frans Morsch and added to ChessBase in 1991. Like most others on this list, Fritz has won many Computer Chess Championship titles over the years.
Fritz is available on Windows and multiple other platforms. Since 2009, the engine has also been available for some consoles like Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, and Sony Playstation 3.
Rybka is another commercial chess engine. Developed by IM Vasik Rajlich in the early 2000s, it has partnered with ChessBase.
This engine sparked some controversy when the International Computer Games Association (ICGA) claimed that Rybka plagiarized its code. However, the FIDE Ethics Commission concluded in 2015 that those claims were false.
Houdini is a commercial chess engine developed by the Belgian chess player and programmer Robert Houdar in 2010. At the end of 2019, Houdini appeared as the highest-rated commercial engine in the world (only behind Stockfish, Leela Chess Zero, and Komodo).
Houdini is not as accessible as other engines since it's available for only Windows.
HIARCS (an acronym for Higher Intelligence Auto-Response Chess System) is a proprietary chess engine developed by Mark Uniacke in 1980. It is the oldest chess engine among those that have reached more than 3000 Elo rating points.
HIARCS is available for Windows and Mac OS.
You now know what a chess engine is, which engines are the strongest, and how to play one of the best chess engines on Chess.com. Head over to Chess.com/CCC to watch top chess engines competing against each other at any time and day!