Meet REMY

Where REMY stands

The current version is REMY 9. Its estimated rating is 2213 on the CCRL Blitz list, a well-known rating list for chess engines playing quick games (2 minutes plus 1 second a move). That's an estimate from REMY's own games, not an official CCRL rating.

REMY's long-term goal is to beat Stockfish, the strongest chess engine in the world, at the same quick games. On the CCRL Blitz list REMY's ratings use (computed October 17, 2026), the highest-rated Stockfish, Stockfish 19, is rated 3793 on one processor core and 3804 on eight.

First milestone, 1500, passed by REMY 7. Second milestone, 2000, passed by REMY 9. Next milestone: 2500.

What made REMY 9: it starts from REMY 8.1, so it judges positions with the final learned square values. It adds two search ideas, aspiration windows and static exchange evaluation. With aspiration windows, REMY first looks for the best move within a narrow band around the score it expects, and widens the band only when the answer falls outside it. Static exchange evaluation works out in advance whether a series of captures on one square wins or loses material, so losing captures are tried last and hopeless ones are left out when REMY settles the captures at the end of a line. In its promotion match against REMY 8.1, REMY 9 won 47 games, lost 24 and drew 51: about 66 rating points better. It also carries two rounds of speed work, which make the same search about 2.3 times faster. The speed work changes no move: at any given depth REMY 9 chooses exactly the same moves as before, only sooner, so on the same clock it can look further ahead. The timed checks of the speed work were exploratory.

REMY's learning of its square values finished after three rounds. Josh registered the third round's values as the final ones on 4 November 2026. On games it had never seen, the final values predicted results clearly better than counting material alone.

Next idea: pawn shelter. REMY's Lichess games showed it pushing the pawns in front of its king early. A Stockfish check of those games found those pushes cost about twice as much as its other moves. This step teaches REMY to value its king's pawn cover. It is a hypothesis being tested. Stockfish is used only to diagnose, never to teach REMY. Where it stands: the data for it has been generated, and the fit waits for Josh's judgement suite, a set of positions he rates by hand. Before its match, a short match is checking a repair to how REMY treats repeated positions.