Houdini

Via the New York Times chess blog comes news of a new claimant to the title of "Strongest Chess Program", for the PC at least. The program is called Houdini, and is the highest rated program on the IPON rating list, ahead of both Rybka and Stockfish. The program is free to download, although I'm assuming the source code isn't available (unlike Fruit,Stockfish etc). It is a relatively new program, so new that it isn't on the last SSDF list (which was released in September 2010).

I've downloaded it to my netbook (not the most powerful test platform), and it runs under Fritz/Chessbase without major problems. I'll have a look at it over th next few days to see how strong it is, although as with most super strong programs, I'm not sure it makes a real difference.