Because of this World Championship, computer chess software has become a major hot topic. Some of the most popular software are Fritz, Rybka, Junior, Shredder, Hiarcs, Tiger, Crafty, ChessMaster and some of the lesser names include Zap, Fruit, etc.
I would like to revisit this topic for the benefit of those who are not so familiar with chess software.
– Which one do you use?
– Which one do you prefer?
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
i use fritz, but my coach prefers shredder. I think it’s fun to play fritz. 🙂
I for one would like to see a torrent file of Rybka(!!) and Hiarcs(!) and Shredder (!).
I’m currently downloading fritz 9 which is the only strong programma I could find in torrents….. 🙁
Come on Chessplayers SEED!!!!!!!!
I heard a lot of good about Rybka en frankly I trust Rybka the most (last game it already gave exf4 exf4 Nf8-e6) which means it is very good!
I gather most serious chess players regard Chessmaster as a joke, but as a novice I like it. It gives me a chance to play virtual “players” of different strengths, which I like.
I also use Fritz and like it, too, though some of its features are idiosyncratic. Its natural-language annotation seems to be a bit overrated as well.
To learn openings, variations and bring you to a strong intermediate level…Chessmaster. As it coaches you…I have ChessMaster 10
Fritz analyses so it is good if you are a highly advanced player
( FM , IM ,GM )
ChessMaster….what do you use ,Susan ?? Any idea what Judit uses too ??
I use Hiarcs myself. And from what I’ve seen of it I think I would like Rybka best. In general, however, I think that, at the amateur level, it doesn’t really matter which programme you use.
Dear susan, your blog is excellent. I use fritz, but i supose no is the best, and not configure my computer with the best options for use fritz9.-kises and hugs.
Paulino aguilera malagón(spain).
i use Rybka… it has predicted something along the lines of 90 percent of the moves of the world championship… except for the blunders of course, which there have been a plethera of…
I use Chessmaster 10. The cost, the interface, the strength of play. I also have Fritz. It is in no way as good as Chessmaster. As for ease of use, or anything else.
I like the chessmaster for its analysis for my level of play. I also like its various opponenents. They feature more variety than the personalities in the other programs.
For serious analysis of my games I use Hiarcs 10 with Hypermodern checked, as it comes closest to the way I think. The other reason I like Hiarcs is because of how easy it is to go back and forth from it to Chessbase and to create a computer opening book that matches what I play.
I recently discovered odds play and can beat Hiarcs with rook odds. Now I’m working on knight and bishop.
Yeah I stayed up to watch the WC and now I can’t sleep. 🙁
i have old fritz and its sort of difficult for a player of my strength (1400) to learn from it without spending hours analyzing variations.
For automatic analysis I use Fritz 9 or Deep Fritz 8. Rybka is probably stronger from a practical point of view but there are some annoying bugs when using it under the Fritz GUI. Vas knows about it.
I am an amateur and use Fritz 9 (have had Fritz 7 & 8). It has taught me a lot, but I am not a fan of its complicated user interface. I still cannot find a good way of understanding exactly how to reduce the playing strength to something I can handle. I think Fritz is the best program for really analyzing my games and learning what I did right and wrong. I absolutely LOVE the point graph, and it immediately helps me understand how I am doing in the game.
I recently downloaded the beta version of Rybka, but I am just too low-level to notice any difference as both engines beat me quite handily. 🙂
I also own and have owned versions of Chessmaster, both for my computer and my PS2. To me, it is probably the most fun to play. As someone else stated, I can set it up to play a “personality” that is probably closer to my strength. The one bad thing about this is that some of the lower levels play some pretty stupid moves that I don’t really think a player of that level would make…perhaps its just trying to immitate human blunders (but some of them have been pretty bad…).
So, I guess just for playing for the fun of it, I like Chessmaster. But for really analyzing my games and trying to learn, I enjoy Fritz 9.
I guess Rybka is the overall best, but for some positions others might be very well (maybe better). If you analyse good positions for white, Junior should do the work, and for equal and peacefull positions there is Fritz.
My opinion! Your, Zsuzsa?
I use Vchess II, and I love it. Easy to handle, and astonishing accurate to GM games, whenever I follow and/or analyse them.
I know it is not the strongest or best and probably inferior to most engines. But maybe I like it for being a “human” engine.
I’m a computer cheat. I mostly use Shredder9 and Rybka 2.1 these days on Yahoo Chess and MSN. It gives me a great ego boost which I need on a regular basis. Was thrown out of ICC for cheating with Crafty (Bob Hyatt’s free engine) and GNU 5. But no more free engines for me these days.
I’m not sure why Chessmaster is considered a joke — can anyone explain why? CM9 is supposed to play at strong GM level. Also, what is meant by saying Fritz “analyzes”? CM gives the strength of various moves but this is not considered analyzing? (As an aside, I had a lesson with a strong GM and he didn’t suggest I switch to Fritz, though he did suggest that I focus on playing individuals rather than the computer). For the record, I’m a relative novice though have played some on ICC.
I like Crafty. It’s free. Why pay to find out what a machine thinks?
I envy you for owning X3D Frits, I tryied to buy it but it doesnt exist anymore
No, it doesn’t, but if you want to play on virtual chessboard, it is quite possible with Fritz9, or any computer program which uses DirectX, and has a full screen display of the chess board. All you need is an LCD stereoglass, which can be purchased for less than 100 bucks, an nVidia based videocard (half of videocards out there have nVidia chip in them, like all Geforce cards), free download of two drivers from the nVidia website, and that’s it. You install the two drivers (they interfere with absolutely nothing else), hook up the glass (without even having to open your computer, it is all outside at the video output), go to the full chessboard display, hit CTRL-T (later you can change that) and presto, you have a virtual chessboard floating in the air………it is more than spectacular, it is breathtakingly spectacular.
Gabor
Ps:anyone wants to ask any question, may write to docobgyn@yahoo.com
Chessmaster 10 Probably used more than higher level chess players admit. No problems here with crashing. Price is much lower than the others on e-bay and places like that.
Gabor, thank you for all the help! I really apreciate it! Your explanation about how to set the 3d is increadibly clear. Will do as you advice (can’t wait to see it myself!)
Almost forgot the most important one.
Unfortunately there is one more item required, which less and less people have: a regular CRT type computer monitor. The stereoscopic 3d doesn’t work with the flat LCD screens.
There is one company which claims that their glass works with the flat screens, but I had the opportunity to test it, and it is very lousy that way, not worth the trouble.
That should really wrap up the whole subject.
Gabor
I classify programs into two buckets. Analysis engines and playable chess programs. What good is a beginner going to get out of playing a 2800+ program that cannot be “dumbed down”? Zilch. Its like a kid playing vs Kasparov. Not much fun.
For playing I like the customization of Chessmaster 10 but people are right, it will often make a bizarre move dropping a piece to similate a blunder. When that happens I take over and make the computer choose a better move and continue the game.
Another one you can customize to a good extent [uci engine] is Deep Sjeng which I play in arena quite a bit. You can’t fine tune it as well but its playable.
For analysis? Rybka 2.1o hands down but its no good for anyone but super gm’s to play against a program strong as super gm’s.
I cannot give a comparison of Fritz 9 (just ordered it) as I don’t have it yet.
Rybka 2.1o is by far the best engine to play against if you are looking to improve your game, however, I think Deep Shredder 10 is the best engine to use when going over previously played games because of its verbose nature during analysis.
You should try Rybka Susan, it really does help your middle-game more than the other engines–at this in my case.
“I like Crafty. It’s free. Why pay to find out what a machine thinks?”
That’s just it, Toga is free as well (even comes with GPL source) but plays in a completely different league than Crafty. It also supports the UCI protocol with features like the multiple variations mode.
Since ChessBase is basically a commercial advertising site and understandably has no interest in telling the world that free software can compete with their commercial offerings, I wish independent news sources would cover free chess software more thoroughly. Almost everyone knows that Rybka is currently the best chess engine, but hardly anyone took notice when Fruit surpassed all other engines to lead the rating lists alongside Shredder.
GM Larry Christiansen will be playing RYbka at World Chess Network at 17.00 EDT today.
GM Larry Christiansen will be playing Rybka at 17.00 EDT at World Chess Network today!
http://wcn.tentonhammer.com
Rybka is obiectivly the strongest chess engine(64bit 2core over 3000Elo) and in one month there will be even stronger version 2.2 So I think it’s worth consideration and check this software. BTW GM L Christiansen(black)lost to Rybka in 45 moves today. Regards to all chessplayers.
Of course it is SMIRF which I prefer. Not only because I have written it by myself, but because it includes a lot of 8×8 and 10×8 chess variants downwards compatibly including traditional chess, like in 8×8 Chess960, 10×8 Capablanca Random Chess and Janus Chess. That is 10×8, where the future of chess programming is to be found.
Hi
Fritz9 is considered medium ground between positional and tactical, people trust it. shredder is considered “strong all around”, and it has a reputation of being solid. Junior is like a silicon Tal, it likes to take risks that computers generally wouldnt take, ie. sac exchanges where the resulting positions are still seriously unclear. IMO Rybka is amazing because my the rybka1 x64 single processor absolutely crushes any of these engines on DOUBLE processors. In addition, I have noticed that it’s nodes/second during analysis is like 10x lower than mostly any of these engines, which is a sign that its search and evaluation functions are not just better, they are on a whole different level. Rybka + chessbase software = Great Analysis (Arena doenst have blundercheck in it, at least not yet)
I am an improving beginner and have a number of chess engines that I use in the Fritz interface (Fritz 9, Hiarcs 10 UCI, Shredder 10 UCI, Rybka 2.1). My interest is in using the UCL_LimitStrength option which allows you to set a specific Elo rating for the engine. I have been doing some experiments with this to see how similar the strength of different engines is when set to (say Elo 1700) because I would like to play against engines set to slightly above my strength. I understand from email correspondance with the Shredder team that they did perform many human-computer games in order to try to calibrate their UCI_LimitStrength option.
My observations are:
Rybka I don’t think this option is calibrated at all – its still way too strong – so I only use it for analsis (which to be fair is I think its designers primary aim)
HIARCS: its strength is a bit stronger than Shredder – for example in 10min blitz games between Hiarcs and Shredder you need to set Shredder about 85 Elo higher in order to get similar scores over 100 games or so. However I don’t like playing blitz and prefer longer games – it turns out that both engines get stronger (as they should) as the time control is increased, but Hiarcs get stronger faster that is by 1 hour time control the difference between them is at least 300 Elo (I think) from my (perhaps too limited trials).
I am interested in playing against at least roughly calibrated reduced strength engines (and I know there are many thorny issues here).
Does anyone else have any information on how similar to human Elo at reasonably long time controls any of these engines are in their reduced strength mode?
Is anyone else interested in this or do other people just set the levels ‘a bit stronger’ than their own strength and not care whether the actual Elo means anything?
Hi Susan,
I have Fritz 5 thru 9,Shredder 9,Hiarcs 10,Chessmaster 10th,Toga II,Fruit 2.1,Spike 1.2,Rybka 1.0 thru 2.1 and a Mephisto Polgar 🙂
I like to watch and learn why certain moves work and why some don’t.
Here is a game Shredder played against Rybka.Rybka is black.
As a GM I think you may like this game very much…
[Event “Rybka 2.2f mp testing 2”]
[Site “?”]
[Date “2006.11.20”]
[Round “23.2”]
[White “Deep Shredder 10 x64 2CPU”]
[Black “Rybka 2.2 mp x64 2CPU w/Fix”]
[Result “0-1”]
[ECO “E15”]
[PlyCount “88”]
[EventDate “2006.11.19”]
[Source “Leto”]
1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 b6 4. g3 Ba6 5. b3 Bb4+ 6. Bd2 Be7 7. Bg2 c6 8.
Bc3 d5 9. Ne5 Nfd7 10. Nxd7 Nxd7 11. Nd2 O-O 12. e4 b5 13. O-O dxc4 14.
bxc4 Nb6 15. Qc2 Nxc4 16. Nxc4 bxc4 17. Rad1 Qc7 18. e5 Rab8 19. Be4 g6 20.
Qd2 Qd7 21. Qe2 Rb6 22. Rfe1 Rfb8 23. Ra1 Bb4 24. Bxb4 Rxb4 25. Red1 Rb2
26. Qf3 R8b6 27. Qa3 h5 28. Rac1 Kg7 29. Qa5 Qe7 30. a3 Bb5 31. a4 Ra6 32.
Qc3 Rb3 33. Qe1 Rxa4 34. Bc2 a5 35. Bxb3 cxb3 36. Qe3 Rb4 37. Rb1 a4 38.
Rb2 Bc4 39. Ra1 Bd5 40. Qd2 Qb7 41. f3 Qb6 42. Kf2 Rxd4 43. Qe3 c5 44. Rab1
Qb4
0-1
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