17 February 2009

Chess960 Engines

The CCRL 404FRC : Pure list (www.computerchess.org.uk) is a list of chess960 engines used in the CCRL trials. I compared this to the list of engines in Arena Downloads (www.playwitharena.com), and found two CCRL engines that are distributed with Arena free of charge: Hermann 2.4 and Spike 1.2. I downloaded both, installed them in Arena, and gave them a test drive. They worked without a hitch. Now I have two chess960 sparring partners.

1 comment:

Deep Mikey said...

Well, working with Chess960 engines since they are existing, I think the best free one is Spike as the winner of the 1. Livingston Chess960 Computer WCh in 2005 at the Chess Classic Mainz. The Arena platform is also not bad indeed, but I guess its too old fashioned in this times, because ChessBase uses the Shredder-FEN in all his latest programs since Fritz 9, which Arena can't read correctly, if I'm not wrong.