Engine of the year? (external poll)

[swami]

Good post.

most of the members would go only for strongest engine obviously,but anyway I would also go for the strongest engine as "the engine of the year" sounds something more along the lines of the best engine out there in the current year etc if it is intended to sound like a "footballer of the year" where the guy with most goal scores or the one with the best average in the matches gets such a fame.But now,I wanted to pick some other engines instead of strongest one, as I'd vouch for Hamsters in "most interesting engine of the year 2007"

I voted for Fruit since I didn't know what that german word for another meant, If I had known I would have voted it as I wanted to pick Hamsters as the freeware engine of the year 2007.Anyway,Fruit deserves some note of thanks, as it is made available as a freeware, a lot of versions were offered, surpassing Toga which was supposed to be its nemesis in terms of improvement.

Even now, there is a beta version of Fruit thats only next to Rybka in Thorsten's tournament, its private but still, the games and results are available.

and Why do I want to pick Hamsters? because its improvement is tremendous compared to other engines, from 0.2 to 0.6 with 50-100 elo per version and it got promoted 3 times in a row, in 3 editions! in my tournaments,certainly the most interesting engine from the friendly author.

[hgm]

Personally, I would vote for Fairy-Max, as it is one of the very few engines where you can, once you get bored with FIDE Chess, alter a few numbers in the .ini file and make the pieces move like no one has ever seen before.

How about playing with a piece (a Trishop?) that moves like Bishop + Pawn in stead of normal Bishops? Or replace Knight by Pegasus, which moves like a Queen but captures like a Knight.

With Fairy-Max you can try it all! And, equally important, it is not unbeatably strong.

[Ovyron]

Or replace Knight by Pegasus, which moves like a Queen but captures like a Knight.

Ah, the other day I was thinking about these kind of pieces, like a Pawn that captures like Knight and other such things, and what their value would be.

All that sounds great, unfortunately (Or fortunately) I am not bored of chess, yet.

[hgm]

Indeed, it would be very interesting to investigate what determines the value of a piece. Is it mainly the captures that determine the value, or the non-captures? What is stronger, a piece that moves like Q and captures like N, or one that moves like N and captures like Q (and by how much?).

Are the forward moves or the backward moves more important? What about a piece that moves forward like a Bishop, and backward as a Knight? would it be stronger or weaker than one that does the reverse? Would one of them be stronger than a normal Bishop? (I think it will be.)

It is exactly for answering questions like that that I built Fairy-Max.

[Mike S.]

I cannot close the poll, but I don't expect big changes anymore. - From 287 votes received:

Rybka 88 (31%)
Zappa 62 (22%)
Fritz 44 (15%)

The people have spoken. The result is not surprising.

4th is Glaurung (10%); we could assign 'Freeware of the Year'.

http://poll.pollcode.com/PBtL_result

[ChessZone.org]

Rybka is the best no doubt!

[M ANSARI]

How can it be anything but Rybka. Rybka has really revolutionized computer chess ... actually it has revolutionized chess itself. Just when we thought that Shredder 8 running on a 1.2 Ghz AMD processor was reaching the limit of engine strength ... Rybka adds a couple of 100 ELO's to that. That is quite an achievement!

[Ovyron]

What more amazes me is that a Bishop and a Knight, even while having very different movement, have pretty much the same value, and I still don't understand why. So a piece that moves like Knight and captures like Bishop and a piece that moves like Bishop and captures like Knight would have the same value of their normal counterparts? Or would the new mix ups be stronger because the bishop can now move to the other half of the board and do forks?

It is exactly for answering questions like that that I built Fairy-Max.

I'm very interested on your results, though I think this topic deserves its own thread.