The Stockfish Story

Stockfish is based on Glaurung, which is written by Tord Romstad. The Stockfish branch was started by Marco Costalba during a period in which Tord was not doing computer chess. Tord later rejoined the team, together with Joona Kiiski. Since then, Stockfish has become the best open-source chess engine. Its strength is comparable to the commercial Rybka chess engine.

Stockfish Technology

Like many other leading chess engines, Stockfish is an alpha-beta searcher and uses a bitboard representation. You can peruse through the Stockfish source code by yourself; simply head on over to the Download page.

The Stockfish Team

The developers.
Tord Romstad Marco Costalba Joona Kiiski
Tord is a professional mathematician and programmer, a hobby sprinter, and one of the world's least talented violists. He used to play chess when he was younger, and hated it so much that he ended up writing a computer program to do this boring and tedious task for him. Marco is a professional developer, a very weak chess player, and an amateur chess engine programmer. Joona is a math teacher, chess hobbyist, and amateur programmer.
These people also do stuff!
Daylen Yang Salvo Spitaleri Jim Ablett
Daylen is a 15-year-old student and chess enthusiast. He happens to maintain the Stockfish Chess website and Twitter account. Salvo is the author of the excellent Stockfish opening book. Jim is an IT administrator and a chess engine compilation guru. He kindly compiles the Windows and Linux versions of Stockfish.

Contacting Us

We prefer that you post questions to the TalkChess forum, but as a last resort you can email us.