Lutefisk is dried whitefish. It is made from aged stockfish, or dried and salted cod, pickled in lye. It is gelatinous in texture after being rehydrated for days prior to eating.
ChessBase GmbH is a German company that makes and sells chess software, maintains a chess news site, and operates an internet chess server for online chess. Founded in 1986, it maintains and sells massive databases, containing the moves of recorded chess games. Databases organise data from prior games; engines provide analyses of games while endgame tablebases offer perfect play in some endgames.
In computer chess, a chess engine is a computer program that analyzes chess or chess variant positions, and generates a move or list of moves that it regards as strongest. A chess engine is usually a back end with a command-line interface with no graphics or windowing. Engines are usually used with a front end, a windowed graphical user interface such as Chessbase or WinBoard that the user can interact with via a keyboard, mouse or touchscreen. This allows the user to play against multiple engines without learning a new user interface for each, and allows different engines to play against each other. Many chess engines are now available for mobile phones and tablets, making them even more accessible.
Crafty is a chess program written by UAB professor Dr. Robert Hyatt, with continual development and assistance from Michael Byrne, Tracy Riegle, and Peter Skinner. It is directly derived from Cray Blitz, winner of the 1983 and 1986 World Computer Chess Championships. Tord Romstad, the author of Stockfish, described Crafty as "arguably the most important and influential chess program ever".
Stockfish is unsalted fish, especially cod, dried by cold air and wind on wooden racks on the foreshore. The drying of food is the world's oldest known preservation method, and dried fish has a storage life of several years. The method is cheap and effective in suitable climates; the work can be done by the fisherman and family, and the resulting product is easily transported to market.
Fresh fish rapidly deteriorates unless some way can be found to preserve it. Drying is a method of food preservation that works by removing water from the food, which inhibits the growth of microorganisms. Open air drying using sun and wind has been practiced since ancient times to preserve food. Water is usually removed by evaporation but, in the case of freeze-drying, food is first frozen and then the water is removed by sublimation. Bacteria, yeasts and molds need the water in the food to grow, and drying effectively prevents them from surviving in the food.
Embassy chess is a chess variant created in 2005 by Kevin Hill. It borrows the opening setup from Grand Chess by Christian Freeling and adapts it to the 10×8 board. Embassy chess is a non-commercial Capablanca random chess variant that is played on a 10×8 board with two additional pawns per side and two fairy chess pieces: the marshall and the cardinal.
Stockfish is a free and open-source chess engine, available for various desktop and mobile platforms. It is developed by Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski, Gary Linscott, Tord Romstad, Stéphane Nicolet, Stefan Geschwentner, and Joost VandeVondele, with many contributions from a community of open-source developers.
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. As of October 2019, Houdini 6 is the fourth highest-rated chess engine on major chess engine rating lists, behind Stockfish, Leela Chess Zero and Komodo.
Komodo is a UCI chess engine developed by Don Dailey and Mark Lefler, and supported by chess author and evaluation expert GM Larry Kaufman. Komodo is a commercial chess engine but older versions are free for non-commercial use. It is consistently ranked near the top of most major chess engine rating lists, along with Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero.
Chess.com is an internet chess server, internet forum and social networking website. The site has a freemium model in which some features are available for free, and others for accounts with subscriptions. Live online chess can be played against other users at daily, rapid, blitz or bullet time controls, with a number of chess variants available. Chess versus an AI, computer analysis, chess puzzles and teaching resources are also offered.
chess24.com is an Internet chess server in English and nine other languages, established in 2014 by German grandmaster Jan Gustafsson and Enrique Guzman. Among people collaborating with chess24 are World Champions, Grandmasters and International Masters including Magnus Carlsen, Viswanathan Anand, Peter Svidler, Rustam Kasimdzhanov, Francisco Vallejo, David Anton Guijarro, Dorsa Derakhshani, Lawrence Trent, Sopiko Guramishvili, and Hou Yifan.
Play Magnus is a commercial computer chess mobile app available for the iOS and Android mobile operating systems. The software is named after World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen and features adjustable difficulty levels for chess players of various skills. It has been available since 2014 and is developed by the Norwegian company Play Magnus AS which was founded by Carlsen.
AlphaZero is a computer program developed by artificial intelligence research company DeepMind to master the games of chess, shogi and go. This algorithm uses an approach similar to AlphaGo Zero.
Leela chess Zero is a free, open-source, and neural network–based chess engine and distributed computing project. Development has been spearheaded by programmer Gary Linscott, who is also a developer for the Stockfish chess engine. Leela chess Zero was adapted from the Leela Zero Go engine, which in turn was based on Google's AlphaGo Zero project, also to verify the methods in the AlphaZero paper as applied to the game of chess.
CuckooChess is an advanced free and open-source chess engine under the GNU General Public License written in Java by Peter Österlund. CuckooChess provides an own GUI, and optionally supports the Universal Chess Interface protocol for the use with external GUIs such as Arena. An Android port is available, where its GUI is also based on Peter Österlund's Stockfish port dubbed DroidFish.
The 17th season of the Top Chess Engine Championship began on 2 January 2020 and ended on 22 April 2020. TCEC Season 16 3rd-place finisher Leela Chess Zero won the championship, defeating the defending champion Stockfish 52.5-47.5 in the superfinal.
An efficiently updatable neural network is a neural network-based evaluation function that runs efficiently on central processing units without a requirement for a graphics processing unit (GPU). NNUE was invented by Yu Nasu and introduced to computer shogi in 2018. On 6 August 2020, NNUE was integrated into the chess engine Stockfish.
The 19th season of the Top Chess Engine Championship began on 6 August 2020 and ended on 16 October 2020. The season 19 superfinal was a rematch between Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero, the same two engines that had contested the superfinal in the previous two seasons. Stockfish, the defending champion, won by 9 games.
