I have the old Windows games adapted for Windows 11 on my desktop at work, and one of those old games is, “Chess Titans”. Even on its top level, level 10, it wasn’t very strong in the opening and middle games because it was subject to isolated and unexplained blunders. It’s end game was downright weak. In king/pawn endgames, the king would blunder away the draw almost every single time.
So, I decided to google, “MS chess app”, to see what would happen. It turns out that Windows has a better chess program now, “The Chess Lv. 100.” Level 30 - 40 was slightly better in the opening, but much better in the endgame. I got up to level 50, and then I read that level 100 rivals a GM rating. I decided to try it. OUCH! I haven’t reached an endgame yet at that level because I’m getting beat right out of the opening. When I decided to click the “Hint” button, the “hint” was, “Do you want to resign?”
Anyway, it is a free download and, if you have periodic downtime at work, it’s a great game at no cost.
Yeah, the TOP top chess programs are still run on dedicated supercomputers (and it’s ludicrous how much better than the consumer ones they are), but even run-of-the-mill consumer chess programs nowadays are still better than the best humans.
Much like the concept of “infinity”, a 3600 rating is something that I can’t really encompass. LOL
I actually do have Fritz 20 on my big gaming desktop, but its basic use is analysis of complex GM positions and for really sophisticated puzzles for which I might not see a solution. When I first got it, I challenged it to a game at its top playing level. It sliced and diced me very quickly.
I have a paid version of Shredder for Android that I run on my tablet and really like it. It has many different levels and the cool thing about it for weak players is that at lower levels it makes occasional stupid mistakes such as a poor player might make. Initially I was mystified why a computer chess program would make such a blunder, but it doesn’t do it at higher levels.
In fact, at higher levels it’s really quite good, and certainly unbeatable by me. A few years ago I posted a game between Shredder on my tablet and the famous MacHack program for the PDP-10 mainframe, the first really strong tournament-level chess program. I was able to run MacHack on a PDP-10 simulator on my PC.(that is, the real original MacHack code running on a simulated PDP-10). I ran two games at different MacHack settings, the first at the default level, the second at “tournament” level which was about the highest it could go without running out of memory and crashing. Shredder beat MacHack both times, in 19 and 20 moves, respectively.
The best algorithms are widely available, so it’s just a matter of how many cores you throw at them and how much time you want to wait for analysis, which in turn is just a question of how much money you want to spend to buy compute time.
The engine versions readily available on the popular chess sites (chess-dot-com or lichess-dot-org) can already get quite deep with minimal wait time, at least for individual positions. And when playing against them even on a cell phone’s CPU, they are unbeatable by any human.
