The Chess Exchange

Hi all

I have quite a few chess engines and programs and I have recently tried to play them in the same interface.

My progress to date is as follows:

(1) The standard Fritz 12 package comes with a few chess engines such as Mate210, Fritz960, Fritz5-32, Crafty23-00, and CometB68. I cannot however find the Fritz12 engine File. Can anyone help with this please?

(2) I also have some Rybka 3 engines (Human, Dynamic, 960) and ChessMaster Grandmaster Edition (The King). I can see that there are at least two distinct types of engine files. Rybka and The King use engines with .exe extension, while Fritz and the other engines listed in (1) use .eng extension. The two are not compatible it would seem. The Chessmaster Grandmaster UI will import the RYBKA 3 engine because they both use engines with the .exe extension. The problem however is that the RYBKA 3 engine does not seem to repsond to time controls and takes forever to move once it is outside of it's opening book.

To summarize then, what I want to be able to do is match the Rybka 3, Fritz 12 and The King using the same interface. Is this possible? I see lots of videos on youtube where this appears to have been done.

Any comments welcome.

Hello to you all on the forum

Gary

Update:

I can now match Rybka 3 and Fritz 12!

You use the 'Create UCI Engine' feature within the Fritz 12 program.

Unfortunately, this feature does not recognise 'The King' From Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition.

Still Investigating.

Gary

Update:

It looks as if The King (Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition) cannot be run outside of it's GUI because it is not as single file - Fritz 12, Rybka 3/4 are all single files, albeit not the same type.

So the only option is to run Rybka 3/4 inside CM. To do this satisfactorily, you need to download a free conversion program (UCI-Winboard) and do a little bit of file editing.

The following link refers for anyone wanting to go down this route.

The only problem now is that I cannot seem to get the engines to work within the time limit (5 mins per game or 3 mins per game). I will post a seperate query on this.

Here is the link, however please ask me if you are not sure - this method does work.

http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/ ... 087706/p/1

also see page 2 for the editing.


Gary

Update:

Matching different engines against each other using the Chessmaster Grandmaster interface seems to work better in ‘Set Up a Position’ mode.

Both engines are still happy to exceed the time controls, but the ‘Force Move’ option works on both engines in this mode.

Results so far:

1) Deep Rybka 4 vs Chessmaster The King (1-0)

Commentary: Deep Rybka gained a decisive victory. Both engines took approx 10 mins for the whole game (Time control set to 4 mins for whole game). The end game was where Rybka’s advantage really told. Both engines were surprisingly slow in the end game even when moves seemed really clear and Rybka was a queen up against a solitary black king!

2) Chessmaster The King vs Rybka 3 (0-1)

Comentary: Again Rybka proves much stronger in the end game. Chessmaster uses an extra 5 minutes whereas Rybka stays within the 4 minute per game time control.

The results were not really a surprise since Rybka is deemed to be one of the strongest programs in the world. Chessmaster although not one of the strongest engines has a superb user interface and training options and is ideal for a player of my limited ability.

I want to match Fritz 12 and Chessmaster next, in the same interface but not sure how to do it at the moment.

Playing different engines was achieved by downloading the UCI to Winboard conversion software (UCI2WB) and carrying out some minor editing. See following link for details:

http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/ ... 087706/p/2

See page 1 as well.

Also, don’t forget to use the ‘Set Up a Position’ option in the Chessmaster interface, rather than ‘Training Mode’.

Hope this helps.

http://www.zshare.net/download/79105325aadc95d8/

Here are a series of games for your perusal between the top engines available.

All games:

Played on a Toshiba Laptop Pentium 4 2.0GHz with 1MB Ram
Played in the Fritz 12 GUI
Time control was 4m + 2s Blitz
Opening books turned off in order to see raw playing power

If anyone would like to select a match please ask.

G