What are your favorite chess engines?

[vittyvirus]

Mine are:
1. Stockfish 5: I've never seen any other engine getting to depth of 26-30 in under 2 minutes.
2. micro-max: More than one elo per character is a unbelievably dramatic achievement. And being the smallest chess program, it beats several other programs (it did 5-5 against Wingletx on my home laptop).
3. Deep Rybka 4.1: It has a very great (but slow) evaluation function.
4. Houdini 4 Pro: It was the champ until yesterday!

[ZirconiumX]

Fruit 05/11/03 won my heart. I cannot for the life of me explain why, but I fell in love with it as soon as I came across it. It had so many different tuning values that I could spend all day figuring out how much of an effect a value had in combination with the others.

I hope one day Senpai manages to do the same, because being presented with a vast array of tuning parameters is like taking a small child to a candy store and saying they can have 5 different kinds of sweets.

Matthew:out

[PK]

I must say I enjoy Spike very much for its active playing style.

Also SlowChessBlitz, coming with its ow GUI, was a program that I used as a sparring partner (or should I say, sparring killer) for some time. It is good in punishing overly passive play, and has just enough minor glitches to give a faint glimmer of hope to a poor human player. Hint: it tends to mishandle Dutch Defense as Black.

[Matthias Gemuh]

I like the fairly accurate scores of Hermann and Muse.

They lack stockfishy depths, though.

[Modern Times]

Zappa and Rybka and Stockfish

Zappa because it was the first engine that I ran on my first quad back in 2008/2009

Rybka and Vasik Rajlich because they dominated the chess scene for a few years, incredible talent and accomplishments.

Stockfish because of the open source model and the army of volunteers who give time and effort to improve it.

[Graham Banks]

Zappa and Rybka and Stockfish

Zappa because it was the first engine that I ran on my first quad back in 2008/2009

Rybka and Vasik Rajlich because they dominated the chess scene for a few years, incredible talent and accomplishments.

Stockfish because of the open source model and the army of volunteers who give time and effort to improve it.

Don't forget your beloved Rotor!

[Modern Times]

Don't forget your beloved Rotor!

Oh yes, Rotor because I like the name !

And I'm a fan of Gaviota too

[Kirk]

Mine are:
1. Stockfish 5: I've never seen any other engine getting to depth of 26-30 in under 2 minutes.
2. micro-max: More than one elo per character is a unbelievably dramatic achievement. And being the smallest chess program, it beats several other programs (it did 5-5 against Wingletx on my home laptop).
3. Deep Rybka 4.1: It has a very great (but slow) evaluation function.
4. Houdini 4 Pro: It was the champ until yesterday!

I have always enjoyed Gromit/Anaconda. It feels like you can beat it when playing it but of course I never do.

Rebel/ProDeo too, even though it should be made SMP and have multivariation mode enabled

[vittyvirus]

Hey I just forgot to mention wingletx. That weak, but simple engine helps me a lot, and I spend half of my chessprogramming time reading and tinkering its code

[reflectionofpower]

I would say Deep Juniors tuned to be more sacrificial as well as the Zappa Mexico II Dissident Aggressor tweak in looking over my human games. Chess Tiger 2007 is still feared by most GM's on ICC and this gives you a good view. MChess Pro was sweet as well as Wchess. Rebel was very solid & positional and of course Chess System Tal II.