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Houdini is the best at blitz and at seeing tactics quickly. Stockfish seems to be best in the endgame and in seeing very deep tactics. Komodo is best at evaluating middlegame positions accurately once the tactics are resolved. Larry Kaufman, who works on Komodo, said in an interview on the Quality Chess blog that: What I can do, however, is cite what some experts in the field have said, and then see if it coheres with my experience of the three engines.
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How they are different on a technical/programming level, I cannot say: Houdini and Komodo are closed-source and I can’t decipher code in any event. In a very general sense, what differentiates Houdini, Komodo and Stockfish are their search and evaluation functions. Evaluation is the set of criteria used by the engine to decipher or evaluate each position encountered during the search. Search is the way that the engine ‘prunes’ the tree of analysis because each ply (move by White or Black) grows the list of possible moves exponentially, modern engines trim that list dramatically to obtain greater search depth. How can we understand the differences between the engines? Let’s consider two key components of chess analysis: search and evaluation. Houdini and Komodo are commercial engines, while Stockfish is open-source and maintained by dozens of contributors. These are Houdini by Robert Houdart, Komodo by the late Don Dailey, Larry Kaufman and Mark Lefler, and Stockfish. Michael Ayton offers one such position in the ChessPub forums if you want have a laugh, check out the best lines of play on offer by the engines reviewed here:Īmong the multiple engines available, there are three that stand above the fray. Such failings have largely been overcome as the engines and hardware have improved nevertheless, there remain certain openings and types of positions that are more problematic for our metal friends. It used to be the case that humans could trick engines with locked pawn chains, for example, or that engines would fail to understand long-term compensation for exchange sacrifices. If all the engines are strong enough to beat me, I think that the quality of their analysis – the ‘humanness’, for lack of a better word – is critical.
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While many people process private matches, there are three main public rating lists: IPON, CCRL and CEGT.įrom my perspective, however, analytical strength is more important.
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So one way that engines are tested now is in a series of engine vs engine battles. There is little question at this point that the best chess engines of the past five years can beat 99.9% of human players on modern hardware. I put ‘best’ in scare-quotes because there are two ways to look at this question. Which engine is ‘best’ for the practical player to use in his or her studies?
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Here, however, I want to take up the thorny issue of choosing a chess engine. ChessBase 12 is the gold standard for chess GUIs, and I will be reviewing a new book about proper use of that GUI in the near future. This, as I have previously discussed, involves three elements: the GUI, the data, and the engine. Increasingly I’m convinced that a serious chess player must make use of chess technology to fully harness his or her abilities.