One important point has to be made concerning Houdini's evaluation numbers. Houdini is a tactical whiz that tends to do best on the various tactical test sets that some engine experts have put together, and it spots tactics fairly quickly. Both Houdini and Stockfish overvalue the Queen. Komodo has the best sense for relative piece values, I think. Houdini best for tactics, Stockfish for endgames and whenever great depth is required. The engine is slightly slower than either Stockfish or Houdini and it seems to need longer analysis time than do the other two. It's also the best engine for playing the opening when out of book early. This is important when there is a material imbalance or the position is closed. This is advantageous in the endgame and in some sharp tactical positions, but it can be a disadvantage in other positions.īecause Komodo's consultant, Larry Kaufman, was a Grandmaster its evaluation is the most positionally accurate. Stockfish is very aggressive in the way that it prunes its analysis, so it can search very deep but as it goes forward, it searches fewer plies. In some positions that can be very time consuming. In order to analyze a specific move with other programs you have to play it then let the engine do its analysis. I don't know of any other program that has this feature. One nice feature of Chess Assistant is that you can refer to its list of all legal moves and tell it which ones you want it to analyze. This explains why the very best correspondence players use different engines and often look at moves that aren't in the engine's top choices. Houdini is the best at blitz and at seeing tactics quickly. Komodo is best at evaluating middlegame positions accurately once the tactics are resolved. Stockfish seems to be best in the endgame and in spotting very deep tactics. The main difference between engines is in their evaluation function. Evaluation is the set of criteria used by the engine to evaluate a position. Pruning is necessary because because with each ply the number of possible moves grows exponentially and so some moves have to be trimmed in order to obtain greater search depth. Search is the way that the engine prunes the tree of analysis. There are two key elements in engine analysis: search and evaluation. Fortunately, my old Fritz 12, which I found several years ago at Office Max for $20 (it was selling online for three times that), is still working and it runs Komodo and Stockfish just fine.Īt the moment the top three rated engines on CCLRs 40/40 list are: I've seen some places where you can supposedly download some earlier versions for free, but it's probably illegal and dangerous, so I wouldn't do it. The newest version of the Fritz program costs about $70. As I pointed out in that post, it's not the individual moves I am interested in so much as the general direction the games took as that can be very helpful in finding a plan.Īs far as I know, the Fritz GUI is the only program that has the Shootout feature. I run Shootouts when I am not sure I believe the engine's evaluation or don't seen how the win can be accomplished. And, in some positions the complications may be easy for an engine to see through but not a human.Īs readers who play through the games in this blog know, I sometimes refer to Shootouts. Try that sometime! In other cases, it may show one side has a huge advantage, but in the long run it may not be able to win. It may mean that the chances are even, but in order to keep the balance you might have to play 10 perfect moves. A position evaluated at 0.00 doesn't mean it's a draw. Sometimes it can be dangerous to trust the evaluation of engines. The recent post of the Cochrane – Mohishunder game is a good example. Another case where you may not want the best move is in a situation where a secondary move gives the easiest win. So, as far as humans are concerned, in a lost position the best move may not be the one with the highest engine score it may be that there is a move that doesn't score as well, but offers the opponent more chances to go wrong. Even then, it won't tell you why one move is better than another unless there is an immediate tactical refutation.Įngines aren't concerned with anything more than what move yields the highest possible evaluation and they don't care about traps and dangerous counterplay. For best results you have to analyze on your own and only then compare your analysis to the engine's. For those that want to improve, this approach can't be recommended. So, here is a post about engines that I hope will answer the reader's question.Įngines make our lives easier.just load a game and let the engine work out the lines. I recently received an email from a reader wanting to know which engine they should use for analysis.
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