the chess engine surprise of 2016 was....

[Dann Corbit]

Houdini 5

[Marek Soszynski]

Aristides!

http://www.talkchess.com/forum/viewtopi ... w=&start=0

[Frank Quisinsky]

Hi Dann,

oh yes, the tactical skills are wonderful (also without the special tactic parameter). Never I was a Houdini fan but version 5 is just great. So today I am more or less a Houdini fan boy ... please give that information not to the others.

Best
Frank and a happy new year for you and all other readers!

[S.Taylor]

If i have to choose one..then it is asmFish
A complete re-write off Stockfish in assembler by Mohammed Li where most people never believed or support him that it will ever works..well he did it

Very nice upcoming engines are Andscacs ,Fizbo & Ginkgo in strenght..maybe one day reach the top

And not to forget Robert Houdart comeback with his Houdini 5

Every Stockfishes & Komodo's we get in the year..for me i should call all engines are a nice surprise

Thanks to these programmers..

JP.

It looks like it might all crash together in 2017. Then I might be in suspense till 2018 to REALLY see how things settle.
I'm ALWAYS waiting for things to settle to see who is the absolute best engine. But even though this was clearly SF, and maybe asmfish even more, i wanted to give komodo a bit more time to see if it weaves its way back to the top by 2017. Komodo has great positional play.

[rcmaddox]

Houdini 5

How did I overlook H5? Yes, that has to be the biggest surprise! I thought Houdini was dead.

[carldaman]

Fizbo for me.
This engine has it's very own unique style of playing chess. It could be the in an innocent looking Position Fizbo Show a Evaluation of nearly +2 while the other engine evaluate the Position nearly as equal. a few moves later it makes Boom! and the Opponent of Fizbo lose a Piece in a sharp deadly attack....so Fizbo has a very aggressive attacking style (some call it coffeehouse Chess) and it's great fun to watch These games.

it seems to me that fizbos strength increases with Long time controls more than other engines...

so enjoy the games of this fantastic engine....

Regards
Andi

+1 for Fizbo, your observations are spot-on.

[Also, Andscacs has been making great strides and is worth a mention here.]

And, of course, Houdini and Shredder's comebacks were huge surprises in themselves, and way beyond expectations, Elo-wise.

Cheers,
CL

[BrendanJNorman]

For me, the most impressive engines of 2016 were:

- Stockfish 8: the strength of this things is really unbelievable. I thought we had another Rybka 1.0 moment on our hands, but then

- Houdini 5: this guy came and was immedietely within shooting range!

Very impressive achievement from these programmers.

Now moving from (what I like to call) scientists to artists (raw strength to style of play/tweakability)...

I was impressed by:

- Rodent II 0.9.64: Pawel's effort to give us access to everything "under the hood", as well as his online tuner are really fantastic. I've already made Karpov, Kasparov, Topalov and Morozevich personalities, which I'm still perfecting but play already very much like the human GMs.

- Prodeo 2.2 SMP: Ed's wonderful idea of using the second core to essentially create a situation where a crazy tactician is always leaning over Prodeo's shoulder saying "try this!" to the more sober Prodeo is just awesome and highlights Ed's "out of the box" thinking in the field.

Christmas wishes for 2017:

- For Ed to create an online Prodeo personality tuner like Pawel has. That would be unbelievably great since Prodeo is traditionally difficult to create personalities for (I DID make a nice one recently though).

- For Pawel to release a Rodent (II 0.9.70? ) with even more human-like prejudices in the parameters like "seek to exchange queens if +2" (sometimes an aggressive personality will be winning, but unlike a human, when given the chance to exchanges Q's he runs away and avoids it) and even a setting like Ed's "attractiveness" or Junior's "favor sacrifices" might be interesting, although Rodent has no trouble sacrificing with the material gauge set to low anyway.

- Fizbo 32 bit: Ive heard so many nice things about this engine and I'm dying to give it a run, but recently switched back to 32bit architecture. A 32bit Fizbo would be great, I'm sure fernando would agree with me whole heartedly.