HIARCS is a commercial computer chess program developed by Mark Uniacke. Its name is an acronym stands for higher intelligence auto response chess system.
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The first version of the program was released in 1980. Version 11, the first version to support multiprocessing, was released in December 2006. The current version, version 13, was released in May 2010.
The strength of the program comes more from its positional algorithms than from its search speed.[1]
HIARCS is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Windows Mobile, Freescale DragonBall and ARM-based Palm OS operating systems (since 2004), and on the iPhone and iPod Touch (since August, 2009). It is one of the few top-level chess programs available for Mac OS X.
HIARCS won the 1993 World Microcomputer Chess Championship.
In January 2003 HIARCS played a four game match of chess against grandmaster Evgeny Bareev, the world's number 8 at the time. All the four games were draws, resulting in a tied match.
Since 2005, it has been tested to be the strongest chess program available on a handheld device. It is the top handheld on the SSDF rating list, and was considered the strongest engine in a comprehensive review of 63 handheld chess programs.[2] It is also the engine used in Pocket Fritz 3.
HIARCS 10 with the "Hypermodern" setting enabled placed second on the SSDF rating list for June 8, 2006, with a rating of 2856.[3]
Hiarcs has maintained a top 5 rating in the SSDF rating list for longer than any other chess engine.
HIARCS won the 17th International Paderborn Computer Chess Championship, in December 2007.[4][5]
HIARCS won the silver medal behind Rybka at the 2008 World Computer Chess Championship.
Hiarcs 13 is the chess engine used in Pocket Fritz 4. Pocket Fritz 4 won the Copa Mercosur tournament in Buenos Aires, Argentina with nine wins and one draw on August 4–14, 2009. The 2009 Copa Mercosur tournament was a category 6 tournament. Pocket Fritz 4 achieved a performance rating 2898 while running on the mobile phone HTC Touch HD.[6] Pocket Fritz 4 searches less than 20,000 positions per second.[7]
HIARCS 13.1 was released for desktop Macs and PCs in May 2010.