
In 2008 HIARCS won the World Computer Chess Championship (after Rybka was stripped of its title). HIARCS won its second World Microcomputer Chess Championship in 1993. In 2003 it drew a four-game match with GM Evgeny Bareev, who was ranked number eight in the world at the time. In the following year, it won the gold medal at the Computer Olympiad. HIARCS won the World Microcomputer Chess Championship in 1991. It remains a strong chess engine with a rating of 3222, according to the July 2020 ratings list of SSDF (the Swedish Chess Computer Association), and is in the top 50 engines on the Computer Chess Ratings List (CCRL). HIARCS has multiple world titles and has been on the computer and engine scene for over 40 years. Since 2012 it has been sold with its own GUI (Chess Explorer) and is available for Mac OS and Windows.

It was developed by Mark Uniacke in 1980 when he was only 15. In 1991 HIARCS was available for PCs, and in 1996 it became marketed by ChessBase and was included in the Fritz graphical user interface (GUI). HIARCS, which is an acronym for higher intelligence auto-response chess system, is a proprietary chess engine.


The engine that has been around the longest is HIARCS. According to the September 2020 Computer Chess Ratings List, there are 60 engines with a rating of 3000+. Chess engines rule the chess world in terms of raw strength.
