I’m having issues with my Internet connectivity, so I’ve decided to play my standard game against a chess engine instead of playing my regularly scheduled standard game on ICC. While I have tried playing in sparring or friend mode, this type of play for me is not realistic enough. What I have done is to use an older Fritz engine, in this case Fritz 5.32, and I have reduced the number of ply depth and the use of an opening book. For my first game, I used the following settings: 1 ply depth, no book and engine Fritz 5.32. The engine did not blunder until move 27, and the blunder it made was very human-like. I would say that it played like at 1200-1300 USCF / 1450 – 1550 ICC human player.
I’ll continue to play around with the settings, and will post more about them as an update to this post.
Tests
Fritz 5.32 – 1 ply depth – no book – est. rating = 1200 – 1300