Raven Chess Engine

Raven Chess Engine

Raven is a chess engine written in C that uses the UCI protocol.

It is very strong compared to humans and is currently rated 2552 on the CCRL 40/15 ratings list.

There are two downloads available

The first download link below (raven_chess_engine_all.zip) contains all versions of the C version of Raven chess engine ranging from Raven 0.30 (CCRL Blitz rating: 1467) to Raven 1.10 (CCRL 40/15 rating: 2530). To play against Raven, load the engine executable file into a chess GUI such as Arena or Cutechess.

These are the ratings of all versions of Raven from the CCRL:

Raven 0.30: 1467 (Blitz)
Raven 0.40: 1843 (Blitz)
Raven 0.50: 2139 (40/15)
Raven 0.60: 2152 (Blitz)
Raven 0.70: 2282 (40/15)
Raven 0.80: 2369 (40/15)
Raven 0.90: 2469 (40/15)
Raven 1.0: 2552 (40/15)
Raven 1.10: 2530 (40/15)

The second download link (version 0.12) is the first version I wrote of Raven chess engine, which was written in Python, and it uses its own interface and has no UCI support. It's very weak, limited to only a depth 2 search, and will only be a challenge for very weak players. To run this, just run chess.exe.

The third download is a opening trainer/explorer that shows you a detailed wiki article for each opening as you make each opening move.  It also highlights potential book moves on the board so you know which moves have book entries. It has over 1,000 opening lines.

Website: http://ravenchess.org/