HIARCS Chess Explorer Pro 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 15.0 (available with the Deep and Premium HIARCS Chess Explorer Pro products)
    • HIARCS 15.0
  • 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:
    • MasterBase - this is a database of games between the world's strongest chess players, generally of last 15 years.
    • AnnotatedBase - 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 - this database contains tactical puzzles. 


Please note you can add other UCI chess engines including third party UCI chess engines into HIARCS Chess Explorer Pro. You can also use HIARCS chess engines in other chess GUIs which support UCI engines. We strongly recommend 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.


Premium HIARCS customers will receive the latest HIARCS experimental improvements, many of these will be aimed scaling on many core systems.


By default Deep HIARCS 15.0 uses half the physical cores of the system. We choose this default so that most customers are able to run Deep HIARCS 15 in multiple database tabs without affecting overall system performance. You can change the number of threads used in the Analysis Explorer toolbar. That allows you to set anything from 1 to a maximum of the number of logical cores on your machine. If you want to change the default threads used for Deep HIARCS 15.0 in all database tabs please go to the Preferences->Engines dialog and select Deep HIARCS 15.0 and set the threads to your choice.


Please note HIARCS Chess Explorer Pro also has a load alert which is a red square which appears in the bottom right hand corner of the window, if you see that you can move the mouse pointer over the red square to get info on the system usage of the engines running.