Manual de Houdini 3 2012

Reference 221 Shredder Winner of a large number of world championship titles. Author: Stefan Meyer-Kahlen (Germany). Hiarcs A positionally very strong engine written by Mark Uniacke (England) See also Cloud Engines .... 3.8.2 Houdini 3 Houdini is a state-of-the-art chess engine for Windows combining outstanding positional evaluation with the most sophisticated search algorithm. The name Houdini was chosen because of the engine's positional style, its tenacity in difficult positions and its ability to defend stubbornly and escape with a draw – sometimes by the narrowest of margins. On the other hand Houdini will often use razor-sharp tactics to deny its opponents escape routes when it has the better position. Houdini is written for Windows and will run on any not too ancient Windows version. On Linux you can run Houdini using Wine without any significant performance loss. Since December 2010 Houdini has been leading all the major Computer Chess rating lists and is widely considered to be the strongest chess engine on the planet. From numerous interviews it appears that many top Grand Masters including the current chess World Champion Viswanathan Anand use and appreciate Houdini. In the new Tactical Mode Houdini 3 will prefer tactical instead of positional solutions. In tactical test suites the Tactical Mode will find more solutions and provide significantly faster solution times, often by a factor of 3 to 10. The Accelerated Principal Variation Search or “Smart Fail-High” is especially useful in very deep analysis when a different move becomes best at very high search depth. Houdini 3 will apply an automatic depth reduction that often speeds up finding the Principal Variation by a factor of 5 to 10. Besides Nalimov and Gaviota End Game Table Bases, Houdini 3 now also supports Scorpio bitbases. These bitbases are loaded in memory when the program starts (requiring about 300 MB of memory) and are then readily available to the engine. Fun fact: Over 10 million chess games were played for the development and tuning of Houdini 3! © ChessBase 2012

Manual de Houdini 3 2012 | Page 221