Fritz: Tactical, but positionally sound. Well rounded.
Hiarcs: Positional and human-like play. Good in unbalanced positions.
Junior: Very tactical, sacrificial style play.
Rybka: Strongest chess engine. Excellent positional understanding and human-like play. Excellent evaluation of dynamic positions. Great for analysis.
Shredder: Very positional and solid. Excellent endgame play.
Zappa: Human-like play, aggressive. Very strong, catching up to Rybka.
Fruit: Well balanced positional play.
Much depends on how you tweak the parameters of the chess engine. Fritz defaults to a high contempt value while Rybka defaults to a low contempt value… which is why Fritz seems a little more tactical and Rybka a little more positional… but tweak the values and that should change. I haven’t experimented too much because I find the dichotomy useful. 🙂
If you had to rate their default playing styles from the most tactical to the most positional, how would you arrange the list of the above engines?
If that seems like a silly question, let me ask a slightly different one: which of these are the top 3 strong positional engines in increasing order? I was just wondering, that’s all, and I have no idea myself. But am very curious as to what you think.
Much thanks in advance.
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