What chess engine does this game use? Is it Stockfish?

[MineralsMan]

What chess engine does this game use? Is it Stockfish?

[Ziggy]

Honestly, I'm not trying to imply anything dodgy here and it may be as simple as the fact that Chess Ultra was promoted largely on the nice graphics and VR. I certainly didn't buy with any expectations of a serious chess tool. At first, I found the engine play refreshing and more 'human like' but as time went on it got a little annoying, making some howling blunders that I would regard as really dumb considering the playing strengths I'd set. Just recently another user posted a blunder made at GM level in the Mate in x tutorials.

This has me thinking that it probably lacks many of the bread and butter, supporting features of most other chess programs, in terms of book play and endgame knowledge, for example. So, a Fritz 'handicap' engine isn't unreasonable as a guess. I think that whatever the incarnation, the engine is configured as a pretty basic one. Thinking time seems overly quick too but that could simply be a decision based on convenience, with casual players as the primary target audience. It might not play well (relatively speaking), but it does look nice and fills that niche well.

[MineralsMan]

yup yup. I'm not making this thread out of any sort of negativity to the game. Love the game ... I'm just a chess enthusiast so finding the engine fun to play got my interest peaked lol.

I just checked and Chessbase gives away the Fritz 11 engine for free with their free software "Chess Base Reader". So it does make sense to me that if they were gonna let another company have a version of their engine, it would be 10 or less ... so it's worse than anything they offer (ie- no real threat of competition). Plus it makes perfect sense why a company like CU or Check vs Mate would want Fritz: it's already ported to nintendo, playstation, etc. Basically a convenient solution right out the box.

[Ziggy]

Ah, it gets a little more complicated. Chessbase aren't giving it away free so much as allowing you to use it within the reader for free, and then only as a kibitzer. Fritz 11 is not a UCI engine. It employs the CB proprietary format, meaning it will only work in CB products, which other than the reader you have to pay for (and much at that). I'm currently running Fritz 17 and it is UCI but my previous version 13 was not. Not sure when they made the switch (could look it up) but there were many changes, including the development team, after version 13.

Think of the CB Reader as something along the lines of Acrobat Reader and it is severely limited compared to the full package. That being said, it's a nice freebie and I have it installed on a small combo laptop/tablet.

But yes, It would seem that Fritz 10 has fallen by the wayside so perhaps it is inexpensive to license and as you say, has been previously ported to other platforms. You've also found another chess program on Steam which uses this engine so I think it is worth considering as a possibility for Chess Ultra.

Many other developers of commercial engines do freely distribute older versions of their engines e.g. Komodo 12, Houdini 1.5, Rybka 2.3, etc. Being UCI, these all plug in easily to many chess programs, including Fritz and Shredder, as well as the many free chess GUIs out there. Open source engines are often as good, if not superior like Stockfish. You can also play around with advanced neural net engines like lc0.

All good fun!

[Nauzhror]

Цитата допису Ziggy:

Umm yes, I do get that engines can play at lower strength. No one has actually said otherwise. Your argument then begs another question; if it was using Stockfish (or any other engine) why cripple it? Wouldn't it make more sense to have Grandmaster play at full strength and scale from there?

This is the standard model employed by every other chess program I can think of, or have used. The difficulty is simply one of many adjustable parameters for a chess engine, such as Stockfish. There is absolutely no need for a separate engine. I have Stockfish (and several others) installed in the Fritz GUI. You tell it where the main binary is located, set the initial parameters and it builds a UCI (universal chess engine) file and that's it. It doesn't spam modified copies of the binary exe. Here's the contents of my Stockfish UCI file:

Name=Stockfish 12
Author=the Stockfish developers (see AUTHORS file)
Filename=C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files/ChessBase/Engines.uci/Stockfish 12\stockfish_20090216_x64_bmi2.exe
Priority=below normal
[OPTIONS]
UCI_Chess960=true
Threads=6

You can see I've told it to use 6 cores by default but I don't need a 6-core specific engine (or version). It can handle whatever you want, provided the cores are there.

Grandmaster at full strength isn't entertaining. Chess games usually seek for their hardest difficulty to be hard, but not unbeatable. Stockfish at full ability, is unbeatable (at least by anything except another chess engine).

[Ziggy]

I have to ask, if Grandmaster level isn't entertaining, why play it?

I've used a large variety of Chess programs over decades and the overwhelming majority do allow their engines to play at full strength. Stockfish may be unbeatable by a human opponent but many chess programs employ it, or another strong engine, primarily for analysis. Of course, Chess Ultra is clearly aimed at casual play and as we have been discussing, it is possible it has been limited. Personally, I stand no chance against even this program at GM level, but at a 2400/2500 rating (we think?) it is certainly beatable by a strong human player.

I'm currently running the latest Stockfish 13 in Fritz and it has a rating of 3550. When I play against it I usually opt for an adaptive opponent mode i.e. I win it goes up, I lose it drops its rating. I find this both enjoyable and educational and has really helped me improve.
It's a different scenario when I analyse my games or explore openings where I will use it at full strength.