Best Chess Engine (other than rybka & zappa) ?

[Tony Thomas]

Best engines are the free engines, I only have a 32bit cpu, so my vote goes to Rybka 1.0, Fruit/Toga, or Glaurung/Scorpio etc. I am a Naum owner, Tony likes it so far.

[Thomas Lagershausen]

It´s absolutly clear that Fruit 05/11/03 is best after Rybka and Zappa.

I can´t believe it that it is freeware!!!

If it is true that the programmer makes a new chessprogram with mp support i would give him my money for shure.

[Uri Blass]

It´s absolutly clear that Fruit 05/11/03 is best after Rybka and Zappa.

I can´t believe it that it is freeware!!!

If it is true that the programmer makes a new chessprogram with mp support i would give him my money for shure.

No

This is not correct

The question was about the
Best mp Chess Engine (other than rybka & zappa)

mp means with 2 processors


http://computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040.l ... t_all.html


Naum 2.2 64-bit 2CPU 2980 +28 −28 60.5% −65.6 50.7% 375
Deep Fritz 10 2CPU 2955 +47 −46 63.9% −85.1 47.4% 137
Hiarcs 11.2 2CPU 2950 +31 −30 57.5% −51.5 36.6% 352

Fruit 051103 2889 +40 −40 54.0% −28.7 39.4% 198


Note that also Naum single cpu has higher rating than fruit

Naum 2.2 32-bit 2895 +25 −25 56.8% −39.0 47.8% 483


Uri

[Ovyron]

I voted for Loop, reason:

Zappa and Rybka are rather bad for opening analysis, if you need something for early out of book analysis, using Rybka will make you lose a lot of time (With her pieces in front of pawns behavior and other bad suggestions), and Loop chooses moves that then Rybka would accept as better (So you save time). You need Loop (Or another engine good for opening analysis) if you want to fill those analysis holes.

[Erik Roggenburg]

I voted for Loop, reason:

Zappa and Rybka are rather bad for opening analysis, if you need something for early out of book analysis, using Rybka will make you lose a lot of time (With her pieces in front of pawns behavior and other bad suggestions), and Loop chooses moves that then Rybka would accept as better (So you save time). You need Loop (Or another engine good for opening analysis) if you want to fill those analysis holes.

On what do you base this assertion?

I'm not trying to be a jerk, I am just interested in how you arrived at your conclusions.

Thanks.
Erik

[Ovyron]

On what do you base this assertion?

I'm not trying to be a jerk, I am just interested in how you arrived at your conclusions.

I got interested in this since what I study about my games, is the part when I get out of book. When I'm in book, I already am playing the best possible moves according to my experience and taste, so engines are useless there. The time spent on analyzing why I did lose a game later on would be better spent playing another game, or studding Chess books/articles etc. And analyzing improvements on the middle-game would be useless since I may not actually play these positions ever again.

So what was important to me was the out of book part of my games (What to do once the memorization part of the game ends), actually, understanding if the position out of book was good for me and what were the best things to try on. I wanted the best analysis tool out there so I bought Rybka, it's indeed the best tool once the game is going on, but when my opponent made odd moves early, Rybka was a disappointment.

She kept suggesting weird moves that I didn't like, such as Nc3 when there's a pawn on d4, or Bishop to d6 when there was a pawn on d7. I had to deep analyze the resulting positions, and the resulting positions from the move I played on the game, and finally Rybka agreed with me that the move I played was better than what she suggested, so I was back to the root position wondering if there was a better move than what I played, I even had to use the randomizer so Rybka chooses a second best move.

In the end, I lost most of the time analyzing useless variations that Rybka suggested, so I needed another engine that suggested the best moves right away in the opening. Then I read turbojuice1122's assertions about Ktulu and Loop being the best engines for opening analysis, so I obtained them and started to analyze with them.

Ktulu was very good when analyzing from the starting position of the game, so it was good for analyzing the soundness of my in-book moves, but that ended really fast as Loop takes over and refutes Ktulu variations.

Now, Loop was doing what I used to do, suggesting moves that after deep analysis proved to be better than Rybka's suggested moves (What you do is analyze the position for some time with one engine, and then with the other, and then the resulting positions from those with both engines, and then the resulting ones from them, and so on. Eventually one engine will agree with the other that its line was better, and in these cases Rybka was agreeing with Loop choices more than with her own choices), so I stopped using Rybka altogether for this kind of analysis.

Of course once you enter the middle game (And this is where the line blurs) Rybka becomes a monster and you should switch back from Loop to Rybka, but you can't imagine how much time I've saved by using Loop to analyze my out of book opening sequences.

[Uri Blass]

On what do you base this assertion?

I'm not trying to be a jerk, I am just interested in how you arrived at your conclusions.

I got interested in this since what I study about my games, is the part when I get out of book. When I'm in book, I already am playing the best possible moves according to my experience and taste, so engines are useless there. The time spent on analyzing why I did lose a game later on would be better spent playing another game, or studding Chess books/articles etc. And analyzing improvements on the middle-game would be useless since I may not actually play these positions ever again.

So what was important to me was the out of book part of my games (What to do once the memorization part of the game ends), actually, understanding if the position out of book was good for me and what were the best things to try on. I wanted the best analysis tool out there so I bought Rybka, it's indeed the best tool once the game is going on, but when my opponent made odd moves early, Rybka was a disappointment.

She kept suggesting weird moves that I didn't like, such as Nc3 when there's a pawn on d4, or Bishop to d6 when there was a pawn on d7. I had to deep analyze the resulting positions, and the resulting positions from the move I played on the game, and finally Rybka agreed with me that the move I played was better than what she suggested, so I was back to the root position wondering if there was a better move than what I played, I even had to use the randomizer so Rybka chooses a second best move.

In the end, I lost most of the time analyzing useless variations that Rybka suggested, so I needed another engine that suggested the best moves right away in the opening. Then I read turbojuice1122's assertions about Ktulu and Loop being the best engines for opening analysis, so I obtained them and started to analyze with them.

Ktulu was very good when analyzing from the starting position of the game, so it was good for analyzing the soundness of my in-book moves, but that ended really fast as Loop takes over and refutes Ktulu variations.

Now, Loop was doing what I used to do, suggesting moves that after deep analysis proved to be better than Rybka's suggested moves (What you do is analyze the position for some time with one engine, and then with the other, and then the resulting positions from those with both engines, and then the resulting ones from them, and so on. Eventually one engine will agree with the other that its line was better, and in these cases Rybka was agreeing with Loop choices more than with her own choices), so I stopped using Rybka altogether for this kind of analysis.

Of course once you enter the middle game (And this is where the line blurs) Rybka becomes a monster and you should switch back from Loop to Rybka, but you can't imagine how much time I've saved by using Loop to analyze my out of book opening sequences.

Note that loop is very similiar to toga based on ccrl statistics about pondering so
maybe people can save money and use toga instead of buying loop.

I wonder if you tried toga1.3.1 to analyze your opening positions and if loop has advantages relative to them(except being slightly faster thanks to parallel search).

Uri

[Ovyron]

I wonder if you tried toga1.3.1 to analyze your opening positions and if loop has advantages relative to them(except being slightly faster thanks to parallel search).

Uri

I didn't. There are way too many strong engines out there and testing them would had taken a lot of time, so I had to believe on turbojuice1122's words on the subject (I think he made a big tournament without books and Ktulu and Loop finished on first place [He has a computer very similar to mine]).

Looking back at my comment, I take back my words "You need Loop", because if you don't want to spend money on an engine you don't have, you may try to fill those opening analysis holes with a free-ware engine such as Toga (Though you may need to check if their analysis is better than Rybka's just like I did, since Loop worked for me I didn't need to test other engines).

[Ponti]

I do this very often (analyse opening moves) with many engines. My own conclusions:

- Toga and Fruit are very solid in openings;
- When you`re playing gambits or very imbalanced positions let Junior analyse it;
- Rybka`s moves and evaluations are sometimes weird - at least to me (2029 FIDE). I`ve heard that too by two friends of mine, one is an IM (=~2400 FIDE) and another is GMI (2516 FIDE), so perhaps it is true for _many_ OTB chess players;
- Fritz is a good analyser (but tends to be tactical), but Junior is better;
- Hiarcs is also a good choice if material is equal and the position is highly tactical;
- Shredder is the best engine to analyse endings; it is sometimes too optimistic in middlegame;
- Rebel/Prodeo is very solid in openings;
- I don`t analyse using Tiger because it is too optimistic;
- the "old" Yace is an amazing engine to analyse endings;
- I also don`t use The King to analyse openings, just some middlegame positions.
- I once tried the "triple brain" approach with Shredder`s interface, but it is difficult to choose a good "team" - maybe using a highly tactical and a more "positional" engine (does that exist?) could be good...

Just my two cents. I think this topic is very interesting!

[Zagalo]

According to WOL 2007, Hiarcs at the top and Naum at the bottom http://www.chess-portal.de/html/tabelle.html