HIARCS Chess Explorer includes the following main components:

  • HIARCS Chess Explorer Graphical User Interface (GUI) - this is the presentation you see and interact with.
  • HIARCS chess engine(s) - this is the electronic chess brain which analyses and plays chess. HIARCS Chess Explorer supports engines which comply with the Universal Chess Interface specification. The HIARCS chess engines included in the package are UCI compatible:
    • Deep HIARCS 14 WCSC (available with the Deep HIARCS Chess Explorer product).
    • HIARCS 14 WCSC.
  • Opening books - these are collections of positions, moves and statistics which help show you the chess openings, play chess openings and classify and name openings played. These electronic books are used by HIARCS Chess Explorer to present the information within them. They cannot be read by other software.
  • Chess databases - these are collections of players, games and commented games which you can load, view, modify, play through etc, etc. The following databases are included:
    • TopGames - this is a database of games between the world's strongest chess players, generally of last 20 years.
    • AnnotatedGames - this is a database of games annotated by strong chess players including International Masters and Grandmasters.
    • FischerSpassky - this database contains all the games played between these great rival players.
    • KasparovKarpov - this database contains all the games played between these great rival players.
    • Tactics-WAC300 - this database contains 300 tactical puzzles, you can see the solution in the game header extra tags dialog.
    • You can download a larger 200K+ database of master games by clicking here


Please note you can add other UCI chess engines including third party UCI chess engines into HIARCS Chess Explorer. You can also use HIARCS chess engines in other chess GUIs which support UCI engines. We advise activation of our engines in HIARCS Chess Explorer as we have found many other chess GUIs are not 100% compatible with the UCI specification for activating/registering engines.