In November 2008, Italian programmer Marco Costalba forked the open-source chess engine Glaurung, created by Norwegian developer Tord Romstad in 2004, producing Stockfish 1.0. With the later addition of Finnish developer Joona Kiiski, the project became a community-driven open-source effort that continuously refined classical alpha-beta search through hand-designed heuristics (king safety, pawn structure, transposition tables). Stockfish became the strongest chess engine in the world, dominating the Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC) for over a decade and serving as the standard analysis engine on platforms like Lichess and Chess.com. In 2020 it incorporated NNUE (a lightweight neural network), moving from a purely classical evaluator to a hybrid one.