Download Frizt and its history

Fritz, a series of chess programs published by ChessBase, until Fritz 13 the engine developed by primary author Frans Morsch and Mathias Feist, Deep Fritz 14 released in November 2013 by Gyula Horváth, and Fritz 15 in November 2015 by Vasik Rajlich. Fritz 1-13 were based on Frans Morsch's program Quest, and was first marketed by ChessBase in 1991 as MS-DOS program with its own Graphical User Interface. Since version 4, released in 1996, Fritz ran on Windows, and is until today one the world’s most popular and successful chess programs. At the WCCC 1995, Fritz became World Computer Chess Champion, winning a notable game versus Deep Blue prototype and the playoff against Star Socrates.

Etymology

The given name Fritz originated as a German nickname for Friedrich, or Frederick (der "Alte Fritz" was a nickname for King Frederick II of Prussia, and of Frederick III, German Emperor), as well as for similar names including Fridolin. Fritz was also a name given to German troops by the British and others in the first and second world wars, equivalent to Tommy, as the British troops were called by German and other troops [9] . Creative ChessBase partner Olaf Oldigs had suggested the name Fritz for the chess program.

Null Move

Frans Morsch, as well as other Dutch computer chess programmers like Bart Weststrate and Dap Hartmann, did early experiments with recursive null move pruning in the late 80s, likely after it was discussed at the panel workshop during the WCCC 1986 after Don Beal's talk covering null move. Frans Morsch told Chrilly Donninger about recursive null move, who popularized it by his Null Move and Deep Search paper in the ICCA Journal 1993.

Descriptions

from the ICGA tournament page:

1995 - Fritz is built around a selective search technique known as null-move search. As part of its search, Fritz allows one side to move twice (the other side does a null-move). If the position after the null-move does not return a high value in the evaluation function, then clearly the first of the two moves did not contain a threat. This applies to 95% of the moves in a search. Detecting such moves before they are searched to the full depth is an excellent method to speed-up the search. In its latest version, Fritz manages a 10-times speed-up over a version without the null-move search. Selective search unavoidably introduces oversights, but these are few. In tournaments against humans and other programs, Fritz has proven to be a tough opponent when defending difficult positions.

1997 - Fritz won the ICCA chess computer world championship in Hong Kong 1995 beating a prototype of the Deep Blue chess computer. It obtained the best computer result in the 1996 man-computer Aegon tournament. Fritz is build around a selective search technique known as the null-move search. Move generators, evaluation functions and data structures have been designed specially to maximise the effectiveness of the null-move search. If anything, Fritz is fast. The search engine is written in highly optimised assembly language. The present version searches at a rate of one thousand processor cycles per position. The openings book was constructed from grandmaster games. Fritz learns from his games and adjusts the probability weights in the openings book automatically.

1999 - Fritz is build around a selective search technique known as the null-move search. As part of its search, Fritz allows one side to move twice (the other side does a null-move). This allows the program to detect weak moves before they are searched to their full depth. Move generators, evaluation functions and data structures have been designed to maximize the effectiveness of the null-move search. Fritz is the winner of the previous computerchess world championship in Hong Kong 1995. 1993 Fritz tied for 1st place in a Blitz tournament in Munich with the complete world elite. It scored the best computer result in the 1996 man-computer Aegon tournament. In 1998 Fritz was leading the prestigious Swedish rating list. It won an active chess tournament Frankfurt 1998 with a full point ahead of 36 grandmasters.

Deep Fritz

Deep Fritz is the engine designed for multiprocessing and parallel search, it first appeared as Deep Fritz 6 in 2000. Since version 14 by Gyula Horváth, Deep is obligatory.

Pocket Fritz

Pocket Fritz is a chess program for PocketPC Personal digital assistants (PDAs). Pocket Fritz 4 is based on Hiarcs by Mark Uniacke, Pocket Fritz 2 used a port of Shredder by Stefan Meyer-Kahlen.