A chess engine is a computer program that calculates chess position and chess moves.
The chess engine decides what moves to make, but typically does not interact directly with the user. Most chess engines do not have their own graphical user interface (GUI) but are rather console applications that communicate with a GUI such as XBoard, WinBoard or glChess via a standard protocol. 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.
Read more about Chess Engine: Interface Protocol, Increasing Strength
Famous quotes containing the words chess and/or engine:
“It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is! How I wish I was one of them! I wouldn’t mind being a Pawn, if only I might join—though of course I should like to be a Queen, best.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is perfect, the engineer is nobody. Every new step in improving the engine restricts one more act of the engineer,—unteaches him.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)