Is there a chess engine that does NOT use brute-force search? Every chess engine I've ever heard of (including all I found listed on Wikipedia) uses brute-force search with an evaluation function (minmax algorithm) to decide on its move.

This is not how most humans approach the game, employing general pattern recognition instead, so in principle, it would be possible for computers to do the same.

Is there any chess engine that does not rely on the brute-force approach to find its moves?
There were attempts back in the 1980s to write chess engines with knowledge bases that would pick candidate moves like humans, but they were unsuccessful. The problem is that human pattern matching is difficult to put into words, so creating the rules for the knowledge base was extremely difficult.

Training a neural network to pick candidate moves seems like a promising line of research. Here and here might be two pertinent papers. (FWIW, It is not my field of Comp Sci)