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2021-06-24

Chess program Shredder is a multiple champion of all kinds of competitions among chess programs. Shredder is one of the most titled and recognized chess engines in the world. It was developed in Germany in 1993 by Stefan Meyer-Kahlen. The list of his achievements includes the following victories:

Shredder free download

at the World Microcomputer Chess Championship in 1996 in Jakarta (Indonesia), in 1999 in Paderborn (Germany) and in 2000 in London (England);
at the World Computer Chess Championship in 1999 in Paderborn, in 2003 in Graz (Austria) and in 2009 in Pamplona (Spain);
at the World Blitz Championship among computer programs in 2002 in Maastricht (Netherlands), in 2003 in Graz, in 2004 in Tel Aviv (Israel), in 2005 in Reykjavik (Iceland), in 2007 in Amsterdam (Netherlands), in 2009 in Pamplona, in 2010 in Kanazawa (Japan), in 2013 in Yokohama (Japan);
at the World Chess Championship 960 among computer programs in 2006 in Mainz (Germany);
at the World Computer Chess Software Champion in 2010 in Kanazawa, in 2015 and 2017 in Leiden (Netherlands).

The World Microcomputer Chess Championship (WMCC) was a separate series of championships from 1980 to 2001, in which only microprocessor programs participated. As for the World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC), the organizer was the International Computer Games Association (ICCA - formerly, ICGA - now).

Shredder has a versatile style, he is equally strong at all stages of the game, perfectly combining tactical motives and strategic understanding of the position.

The engine compares favorably with most others with its own graphical GUI. This can be especially interesting for novice chess players, for whom finding and installing an interface for working with the engine, as well as an opening book, can cause difficulties in the first couples.

Ranking for 2021

The multiprocessor version of the Deep Shredder 13 engine is currently significantly inferior to the strongest chess programs such as Stockfish or Komodo . In one of the most popular CCRL 40/40 rating lists as of November 20, 2020, Deep Shredder ranks only 13th:

Download Shredder free

Shredder is commercial software and is not distributed free of charge. However, for review, the developer offers the opportunity to download a free demo version of the product.

Shredder free download

Current version: Shredder 13 (20 Nov 2020).

Available on operating systems: Windows, Macintosh, Linux.

2018-03-01

Brainfish is a standard Stockfish chess engine extended by a general book format, which is capable of handling a reduced part of Cerebellum, which is an innovative chess opening and playing book. In BrainFish the Book moves are only used in engine games, not in analysis mode.
All moves in the distributed book Cerebellum_light.bin generated by Cerebellum where calculated by using Stockfish as analysis engine, without using statistics. Then those moves where again recalulated by the Cerebellum Library using a graph algorithm which makes all scores in the library consistant. Consistant scores means for example when the starting position has a score of 0.2 and a best move is 1.e4, the position after 1.e4 must have the score -0.2. Additional some others properties are found like the best main line for a position and possible Transitions.

That means when Brainfish is playing, it plays like Stockfish regarding the evaluation, only a much higher skill level. The lines in Cerebellum_light.bin are in some cases reaching the late middlegame and endgame. Pondering is only active after the last move out of the book has been played

BrainFish is licensed unter the GPL, which includes the access code to the general book format.

Download Engine

Download Book

Official Page and details

2017-08-21

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.

Fritz User Interface

Fritz 1

Fritz 5

Download Fritz

Deep Fritz 14

Recent Deep Fritz GUI is suited to run other ChessBase or UCI engines with either using its own proprietary protocol, as well as the UCI protocol.

2017-07-25

Xchess, a commercial chess program with 3D graphics board for the Atari ST by chess programmer Bert van der Liet and graphic artist Karin van Bodegraven, released in 1986. XChess is based on the chess engine SCHK-Y, written in C and 68000 assembly, which played the DOCCC 1986.