The Computer Chess Engine Battle

Chessbase just ran an article on their website talking about the different styles of chess engines, or rather THEIR chess engines. I find it funny how the chessbase people simply ignore the fact that the 2 best chess engines, Rybka and Zappa Mexico, even exist. They basically refused to play a match against Rybka because they know they would get beat, and really really bad. As a businessman, I can’t blame them for ignoring a competitor, but as a chessplayer it makes me pretty mad.

 I’ve found Rybka to be the best program to use to improve your chess, since it really doesn’t play like a computer. It makes all kinds of positional sacrifices that a human would make, but historically a computer would never make. The evaluations are also a lot more accurate. For instance, when I see an evaluation of +1.00 from a computer, I think that means the position should be winning. If Fritz or Shredder spits out this eval, there is a good chance its only a slight edge for white. All this makes it confusing for the amateur player. With Rybka, +1.00 almost always means black is dead. If anything it tends to underevaluated positions a little rather than over evaluate like Fritz/Shredder.

I will admit, I have not tried Fritz 11 yet, perhaps they have made some improvements to the engine. But, I’ve heard nothing from the computer chess community saying that Fritz 11 is anything special, so it’s probably just some kind of repackaged version of Fritz 10. The only thing I like about Fritz is that it’s a standalone program, which means you can easily play practice games against it. With Rybka, it’s just the engine, so you need another program (like Chessbase 9) to run it.