Komodo and Dragon by Komodo Chess (also known as Dragon or Komodo Dragon) are UCI

chess engine In computer chess, a chess engine is a computer program that analyzes chess or chess variant positions, and generates a move or list of moves that it regards as strongest. A chess engine is usually a back end with a command-line interface wit ...

s developed by Komodo Chess, which is a part of Chess.com. The engines were originally authored by

Don Dailey Don Dailey (March 10, 1956 – November 22, 2013) was an American longtime researcher in computer chess and a game programmer. Along with collaborator Larry Kaufman, he was the author of the chess engine Komodo. Dailey started chess programmi ...

and GM

Larry Kaufman Lawrence Charles Kaufman (born November 15, 1947) is an American chess and shōgi player. In chess, he was awarded the title Grandmaster by FIDE for winning the 2008 World Seniors Championship (which he later retroactively shared with Mihai ...

. Dragon and Komodo are

commercial Commercial may refer to: * a dose of advertising conveyed through media (such as - for example - radio or television) ** Radio advertisement ** Television advertisement * (adjective for:) commerce, a system of voluntary exchange of products and s ...

chess engines, but older versions of Komodo (13 and older) are free for non-commercial use. Dragon is consistently ranked near the top of most major chess engine rating lists, along with Stockfish and

Leela Chess Zero Leela Chess Zero (abbreviated as LCZero, lc0) is a Free and open-source software, free, open-source, and deep neural network–based chess engine and volunteer computing project. Development has been spearheaded by programmer Gary Linscott, who ...

History

Komodo

Komodo was derived from Don Dailey's former engine Doch in January 2010. The first multiprocessor version of Komodo was released in June 2013 as ''Komodo 5.1 MP''. This version was a major rewrite and a port of Komodo to

C++11 C++11 is a version of the ISO/ IEC 14882 standard for the C++ programming language. C++11 replaced the prior version of the C++ standard, called C++03, and was later replaced by C++14. The name follows the tradition of naming language versions b ...

. A single-processor version of Komodo (which won the CCT15 tournament in February earlier that year) was released as a stand-alone product shortly before the 5.1 MP release. This version, named ''Komodo CCT'', was still based on the older C code, and was approximately 30 Elo stronger than the 5.1 MP version, as the latter was still undergoing massive code-cleanup work. With the release of Komodo 6 on 4 October 2013, Don Dailey announced that he was suffering from an acute form of

leukaemia Leukemia ( also spelled leukaemia and pronounced ) is a group of blood cancers that usually begin in the bone marrow and result in high numbers of abnormal blood cells. These blood cells are not fully developed and are called ''blasts'' or ...

, and would no longer contribute to the future development of Komodo. On October 8, Don made an announcement on the Talkchess forum that Mark Lefler would be joining the Komodo team and would continue its development. On May 24, 2018, Chess.com announced that it has acquired Komodo and that the Komodo team have joined Chess.com. The Komodo team is now called Komodo Chess. On December 17, 2018, Komodo Chess released Komodo 12.3 MCTS, a version of the Komodo 12.3 engine that uses

Monte Carlo tree search In computer science, Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) is a heuristic search algorithm for some kinds of decision processes, most notably those employed in software that plays board games. In that context MCTS is used to solve the game tree. MCT ...

instead of

alpha–beta pruning Alpha–beta pruning is a search algorithm that seeks to decrease the number of nodes that are evaluated by the minimax algorithm in its search tree. It is an adversarial search algorithm used commonly for machine playing of two-player games ...

/ minimax. The latest version, Komodo 14.1, was released on November 2, 2020.

Dragon

On November 9, 2020, Komodo Chess released ''Dragon by Komodo Chess 1.0'', which features the use of

efficiently updatable neural network An efficiently updatable neural network (NNUE, a Japanese wordplay on Nue, sometimes stylised as ƎUИИ) is a neural network-based evaluation function whose inputs are piece-square tables, or variants thereof like the king-piece-square table. NN ...

s in its

evaluation function An evaluation function, also known as a heuristic evaluation function or static evaluation function, is a function used by game-playing computer programs to estimate the value or goodness of a position (usually at a leaf or terminal node) in a g ...

. Dragon is derived from Komodo in the same way that Komodo was derived from Doch. Dragon is also called ''Komodo Dragon'' in certain tournaments such as the Top Chess Engine Championship and the

World Computer Chess Championship World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) is an event held periodically since 1974 where computer chess engines compete against each other. The event is organized by the International Computer Games Association. It is often held in conjunction with ...

(WCCC) but not in the Chess.com Computer Chess Championship (CCC). The latest version, Dragon 3.1, was released on July 29, 2022.

Competition results

Komodo

Komodo has played in the ICT 2010 in Leiden, and further in the CCT12 and CCT14. Komodo had its first tournament success in 1999, when it won the CCT15 with a score of 6½/7. Komodo also fared very well in the

TCEC Top Chess Engine Championship, formerly known as Thoresen Chess Engines Competition (TCEC or nTCEC), is a computer chess tournament that has been run since 2010. It was organized, directed, and hosted by Martin Thoresen until the end of Season 6; f ...

competition, where in Season 4, it lost only eight out of its 53 games and managed to reach Stage 4 (Quarterfinals), against very strong competition which were running on eight cores (Komodo was running on a single processor). In TCEC Season 5, it won the superfinal against Stockfish. It managed to reach the Superfinal in TCEC Season 6 again, but this time, it lost to Stockfish. Komodo regained the title in TCEC Season 7, defeating Stockfish in the superfinal. In TCEC Season 8, Komodo defeated Stockfish again in the superfinal. Komodo won both the World Computer Chess Championship and World Computer Software Championship in 2016. Komodo once again won the World Computer Chess Championship and World Blitz in 2017. Komodo came third in TCEC Season 11 losing to Stockfish and Houdini, and came second in Season 12 losing to Stockfish.

Chess.com Computer Chess Championship

Komodo MCTS

Dragon

Chess.com Computer Chess Championship

Top Chess Engine Championship

Notable games

Komodo vs Hannibal, nTCEC - Stage 2b - Season 1, Round 4.1, ECO: A10, 1–0
Komodo sacrifices an

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for positional gain.
Gull vs Komodo, nTCEC - Stage 3 - Season 2, Round 2.2, ECO: E10, 0–1
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References

External links

* {{Portal, Chess 2010 software Chess engines Applied machine learning