![fritz chess engine fritz chess engine](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EuiH56RWQAAwg2e.png)
#Fritz chess engine software#
It is now Stockfish that has been copied instead of Leela, but the overall style is unchanged:Īs with Leela and FF1, only minimal changes have been made to the Stockfish engine (again, the name of the software and the authors, and some default parameters). The Stockfish team had the same painful experience as the Leela team when Silver decided to jump on the hype train again, and released Fat Fritz 2, sold by ChessBase for €99.90. This feature improved Stockfish significantly, restoring its status as the strongest existing chess engine. In 2020, Stockfish, Leela’s main competitor, started to support NNUE, fast neural networks that can run on a CPU. Gian-Carlo Pascutto is an author of several strong Chess and Go engines and contributor to the Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero projects. Similarly, when compared to Leela, the strongest configuration of Leela was not used.
![fritz chess engine fritz chess engine](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cSn5C5jfb7Y/maxresdefault.jpg)
Silver’s Stockfish comparison, for example, used an outdated version of Stockfish even though the development version was known to be considerably stronger. In ChessBase articles, the Fat Fritz “engine” was described in a way that implied it was stronger than Stockfish and Leela, but the evidence was questionable. Even this article begins by describing an “inspiring” talk given by a DeepMind employee to ChessBase programmers, supporting the false impression that ChessBase played a significant role in the development of the Fat Fritz code.
![fritz chess engine fritz chess engine](https://gamefabrique.com/screenshots2/pc/fritz-8-deluxe-04.big.jpg)
Probably the closest to what can be called an “attribution” is a brief mention in the middle of one of the articles, saying that Fat Fritz uses Leela “as a foundation.” In reality, Fat Fritz is Leela, but with a different net. As an example, the product description begins, “It’s a semi-secret development, an AlphaZero clone, engineered over the past nine months,” and doesn’t mention Leela. Once again, it used the Leela engine without functional changes (the changes made included modifying the name and author strings, and some default parameter values).įat Fritz was marketed as if it were an innovative engine, instead of being just a renamed Leela. The following year, Silver released an updated version of the DeusX network under the name Fat Fritz, sold as a part of ChessBase’s Fritz package for €79.90. Silver described himself as the engine author even though the engine itself was Leela without significant modification. While an overwhelming part of DeusX’s strength is inherited from Leela, Silver downplayed the Leela work enormously in an interview, suggesting that he did in a few months what had taken other engine authors decades. But they have never pretended to have created a new engine by training a new network. Training such a network is not unusual members of the Leela project do so regularly to test ideas. The network was trained using scripts from the Leela project, and the network architecture was the same as that used by the Leela engine (see this older Leela blog post for details). In July 2018, Silver secretly sent the Leela Chess Zero engine with a custom neural network he had trained to participate in TCEC under the name DeusX. Silver, we would like to share our impression of these releases. A few days ago, ChessBase released Fat Fritz 2, described on their website as the “new number 1” chess engine “with a massive new neural network, trained by Albert Silver with the original Fat Fritz.” They advertise Fat Fritz 2 as using novel strong ideas compared to existing chess engines, but in reality Fat Fritz 2 is just Stockfish with a different neural network and minimal changes that are neither innovative nor appear to make the engine stronger.Īs this is not the first time something like this has happened involving both ChessBase and A.