INTERESTING Engines with Unique Styles (Unlike SF)

[supersharp77]

This is a fresh thread for Thorsten's idea of making a list of all "interesting" engines.

For me, in no particular order, they are:

Teki 2
Thinker 5.1c Passive
Baron 1.8.1
Gandalf 6
WChess 1.06
Vajolet 2.03
ProDeo 1.0-1.6 (assuming no personality used)
ZuriChess Graubuenden
Alfil 8.11
Stash 21.0 (new discovery...nice style to play against)
CM9000 (King 3.23)
Lambchop
Gromit 2.2
Horizon 4.3
Wyldchess 1.5.1
Detrich Kappe's "Distilled" Leela Nets like Bad Gyal etc
Winter
Zarkov
Trace

Tons more. Let's see your opinions.

Well Since The Subject Is "Interesting Engines" Figured I'd Put in my 2 cents...

1. Lchess 5.0 Lchess 5.3 or Lchess 6.0 I have had loads of fun with Lchess..very Human Like Sparring Partner
will let you attack and then defend like crazy!!
2. Fritz 5.32 or Fritz 6.0....The Global Original...
3. Chess Master 3.12d Or 3.32 or 3.33 The Standard Of Chess Engines
4. Crafty 20.14 Crafty 19.0 or Crafty 18.14....Crafty Classic....More Fun....
5. Comet A-10 Comet B46 Comet B53....solid chess player
6. Lizard WB Engine.. Having quite a bit of fun with this one of late
7. Leelafish Engines...Wow loads of dual engine possibilities with this one
8. Rodent Engines....tons of different settings and personalities...you will never get bored
9. Open Tal...Likes The Attacking Game
10. n2 x32 and N2 x64 Plays a interesting game once you get the settings down...
11. Tretola Engine...had a ton of fun with this engine...attacks with abandon most of the time..
12. Cuckoo Chess Engines...just getting them to work (Early Java) was a great challenge...
13. Thinker Engines...Thinker 3.0C Thinker (Original) Thinker 4.7 and Thinker 5.1C...never boring...
14. Hiarcs Paderborn 2007....A personal favorite ....solid and strong...Hiarcs 10 UCI
15. Ziggurat 0.21 not easy to set up...quite a bit of fun ..plays better in Win 10 than Win XP though...
16. Milady Engines...quite a bit of trouble.. only one version worked in the Lokasoft GUI.. played pretty good..
17. Sjeng Engines...had a bunch of fun with Sjeng...Deep Sjeng 3.0...Sjeng 12.7 Sjeng V Sjeng IV...FUN..
18. Stockfish 1.0 Believe it or not still can beat 90-95% of the engines out there...!!
19. Chads Chess..100% programmable...better the inputs..the better it plays...
20. Supra Engines....A labor of love by the author.....lots of options...interesting style...
21. Spider Chess...had a bunch of fun with this one...lots of settings and options...
22. BugChess.....at least 7-8 different versions.....totally unique style.setup is a touch complex...worth the wait..
23. Movei 007-Movei 8_438.. Had a lot f fun with Movei.....not easy to set up..a great style...
24. Alaric Engines....Unique style and tons of options..winboard or UCI settings....
25 Danasah...Danasah 466 somewhat tactical......alot of fun....fantastic engine...
26. Amundsen 0.65....Likes to attack I enjoy watching it play....
27. Capture R01.....loses on time too often (engine matches) but has a quite interesting style.
28. Deep Junior 10, 12, 12.5 etc...Man....had a bunch of fun and Interesting Games with these engines
29 Junior 7 Junior 5,6, 9, 10.....Attacking Chess....somewhat flawed but always dangerous even vs Stockfish!
30. Chiron....Had a bun of fun and interesting chess contests...
31. Rybka Rybka 2.3.2.....Rybka 1.0 Beta... Rybka 3.1 human...Many positional Masterpieces Played..
32. Bulldog v1.0 Had a lot of fun setting this one up and letting it loose....not dull...

[OliverBr]

4. Crafty 20.14 Crafty 19.0 or Crafty 18.14....Crafty Classic....More Fun....

This happens with many older engines when I left chess programming in 2010.. They were beatable (at least by my chess engine OliThink) and fun. Now they are 300-500 ELO stronger, not beatable and boring. What happened?

[AdminX]

You will see it’s like Christmas.

On a side note, I was looking at your 100 Mhz test games over at schachcomputer.info and was wondering if you have a database of those dedicated systems test games that you would not mind sharing?

[mvanthoor]

This happens with many older engines when I left chess programming in 2010.. They were beatable (at least by my chess engine OliThink) and fun. Now they are 300-500 ELO stronger, not beatable and boring. What happened?

At the top, perfection happened.

As the engines get stronger, they make less mistakes and leave less opportunities for opponents to take advantage of. The engines become more perfect. As "perfect" implies there is only one (or maybe very few) ways to play correctly, the engines will naturally converge towards one another, and then more perfection means less fireworks and less excitement.

It's the same with human chess. Between 1850 - 2000, grand masters were strong, but still understandable. In the old times, they even played unsound moves and sacrifices that only worked because of the (often tactical) shortcomings of their opponents. Still, they're exciting games to review, even now. Since 2000, grand masters are learning from computers, and they are studying the latest opening theory 30 moves deep. I've seen commentators say that "X comes up with a novelty here..." at move 34 or thereabouts. In earlier times, many games were over by that time.

Carlsen actually made the news because he LOST a game after going 125 (one-hundred-and-twenty-five!) games without a defeat.

( https://www.firstpost.com/sports/world- ... 02741.html )

In short: perfection is boring to watch. It's boring to compete against because you can't win, except if you're almost perfect yourself.

It's much more exciting to have your engine play in the 2000-3000 range, where there are many opponents that, even though they are strong, still have weaknesses. Your own engine also has its own weak points. It's exciting to see your own engine exploit a weakness of its opponent with a dazzling combination or a masterful positional trick... and if it happens TO your engine, you can only admire the opponent and strive to patch that weakness.

At 3000 ELO it becomes very difficult to improve, and after 3200 Elo, some developers simply quit because at that point, you're programming your brains out and using the energy of half a city to write and test a new function to gain another 10-20 Elo. (Exception... NNUE.)

[reflectionofpower]

BLASPHEMY Where is MChess Pro?

[JohnWoe]

My engine Sapeli 1.93.
See the games here (With small book): https://lichess.org/@/SapeliEngine
It has typical materialistic style: https://lichess.org/kT9ahinb

[hafni]

-----------------------------------------------------------
My engine Sapeli 1.93.

https://github.com/SamuraiDangyo/Sapeli
------------------------------------------------------------

Sorry but your link is wrong or there is a problem with github

Best regards

[mkchan]

With regards to WyldChess, I created this personalities feature inspired by Rodent and specifically made a "Drunk Attacker" personality which was originally intended to emulate Alekhine because I loved the way he develops his attacks even though they aren't always sound.

It's a fairly simple idea: jacking up king attack and mobility related metrics till I was able to produce several games where it completely demolished me with sacrifices. Of course the elo should be very low, but it's not intended for playing GMs or average chess engines anyway.

[BrendanJNorman]

With regards to WyldChess, I created this personalities feature inspired by Rodent and specifically made a "Drunk Attacker" personality which was originally intended to emulate Alekhine because I loved the way he develops his attacks even though they aren't always sound.

It's a fairly simple idea: jacking up king attack and mobility related metrics till I was able to produce several games where it completely demolished me with sacrifices. Of course the elo should be very low, but it's not intended for playing GMs or average chess engines anyway.

I already love WyldChess, but which version has the Alekhine personality and how do I set it up?

[mkchan]

With regards to WyldChess, I created this personalities feature inspired by Rodent and specifically made a "Drunk Attacker" personality which was originally intended to emulate Alekhine because I loved the way he develops his attacks even though they aren't always sound.

It's a fairly simple idea: jacking up king attack and mobility related metrics till I was able to produce several games where it completely demolished me with sacrifices. Of course the elo should be very low, but it's not intended for playing GMs or average chess engines anyway.

I already love WyldChess, but which version has the Alekhine personality and how do I set it up?

Hi Brendan, it seems the release for that version was not on github for some reason (even though I do remember making it for the DGT Pi project). I have made a release on github with Windows and Linux executables and instructions on how to use the persona feature here: https://github.com/Mk-Chan/WyldChess/re ... tag/latest. Feel free to give it a try!