Question for the CCRl Team, Fritz=Ginkgo ?

[rainhaus]

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Hi Graham,

I haven't posted here for a while, but I read along from time to time and also look at the rankings.

I have a question about the two engines Ginkgo Vienna 64-bit 4CPU (rank 16, 4005 Elo) and Fritz 18 Neuronal 64-bit 4CPU (rank 30, 3030 Elo) in your 40/15 list. Both differ significantly in playing strength, but isn't that the same engine?

The CCRL site says that "Ginkgo Vienna is available from Chessbase, where it is branded and sold as PowerFritz 18". Sure, but again, what engine the heck is Fritz 18 Neuronal? https://ccrl.chessdom.com/ccrl/4040/cgi ... 64-bit_4CPU.

At WCSC 2022 in Vienna, Frank Schneider, the author present there, used only his Ginkgo program, with which he became world champion. Exactly this engine was then implemented in Power Fritz 18, according to ChessBase.

This is the crux of the matter. Probably there is an obvious explanation!

Many greetings from the CSS forum.

Rainer

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[Graham Banks]

Hi Rainer,

this was posted at the time of release. You can find it in here by using the search function.

Starting today, all Fritz18 users will receive an additional engine as a free update: Fritz18 Neuronal. The new engine Fritz18 Neuronal achieves an increase in playing strength of about 120 ELO points compared to the classic Fritz18 engine at shorter time controls. Simply start Fritz18 and start the automatically offered update! Then the new engine will be installed!

The classic Fritz18 engine has a manually optimised rating function and achieves a playing strength of about 3300 ELO. In the new Fritz18 Neuronal engine, the rating function has been replaced by a fast neuronal network (NNUE), enabling play 120 ELO points better, (i.e., achieving about 3,400+ ELO). NNUE stands for "Efficiently updatable neural network", the abbreviation being read from right to left because the idea was first published in Japanese in connection with shogi.

The special feature of NNUEs is that they are relatively small, and can be efficiently evaluated incrementally during the search. NNUEs do not require a GPU - the instruction set extensions of modern CPUs (SSE2, AVX2 or AVX-512) are sufficient. The fastest version of Fritz 18 Neuronal, which uses the AVX-512 instruction set, achieves approximately the same number of nodes (NPS) as Fritz 18; the AVX2 version (all modern CPUs) is only 5% slower.

A total of approx. 5 million games were played, and from these, 400 million rated positions were generated for training the net. The first net was trained based on evaluations from 200,000 self-play games of Fritz18, then in a further 80 training iterations, a total of about 300 intermediate versions of the net were tested and the best net was chosen step by step.
So: Start Fritz18! Install the update! Important: only for Windows 64 Bit!

And how Chessbase marketed Power Fritz 18:

Power Fritz 18 Upgrade from Fritz 18

Fritz has fascinated the chess world for 30 years. And the success story continues: In Vienna, the most popular chess program was able to underline its exceptional position again: The newly developed neural engine with NNUE technology won the official chess software world championship! With Power Fritz 18 you have the world champion program on your PC!

[Graham Banks]

In our 40/15 lists:

Ginkgo Vienna 64-bit 3351 = Power Fritz 18 64-bit
Fritz 18 Neuronal 64-bit 3259
Fritz 18 64-bit 3194

Ginkgo Vienna 64-bit 4CPU 3405 = Power Fritz 18 64-bit 4CPU
Fritz 18 Neuronal 64-bit 4CPU 3330
Fritz 18 64-bit 4CPU 3284

[rainhaus]

Hi Graham,

Thanks for the quick clarification and additional info. Guess it's all clear now, so it is two different engines after all.
Then Power Fritz has really added one more. Rank 16 is not so bad for a Fritz with its own author, even if it is called Ginkgo Vienna. Who asks, knows

Rainer

[Graham Banks]

Hi Graham,

Thanks for the quick clarification and additional info. Guess it's all clear now, so it is two different engines after all.
Then Power Fritz has really added one more. Rank 16 is not so bad for a Fritz with its own author, even if it is called Ginkgo Vienna. Who asks, knows

Rainer

Frank has made good progress. I hope that it continues.

[Werewolf]

Fritz 19 might be serious.

[rainhaus]

Fritz 19 might be serious.

Well, this makes curious, questions arise. Do you know something we don't know? When at all are engines to be taken seriously, from which rank? Which author could it be ?
Ed has written for ChessBase before or A. Silver is writing a new Fritz from scratch or Frank Schneider is overcome by inspiration.
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