You can set the skill level. As a complete chess novice, I can do okay at very low difficulty. A level or two above the minimum and it completely wrecks me thou

You can set the skill level. As a complete chess novice, I can do okay at very low difficulty. A level or two above the minimum and it completely wrecks me though. For anyone interested in playing with it yourself, you can use python-chess (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-chess https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-chess) to set up / play against the engine (or make engines play against each other) without having to directly use the UCI commands. edit: It looks like there are quite a few other front-ends that will work with Stockfish. Fritz and PyChess look popular. I just used python-chess for a project a while ago.