Russell Sherwood Sunday, July 30, 2017
As I have mentioned a number of times most Chess Engines are not well suited to Correspondence Chess. In fact many, if not most, Engine Analysis techniques methods are designed to cover some of the gaps left in engine design.
Many Engines can be modified for CC in their Parameter file and some of the sensible choices in this area were covered in a previous article. There are a number of current engines that do significantly better than most in terms of CC performance. So (in no particular order)
Houdini 5 (and previous versions to a certain extent) – Tactical mode allows a much shallower, deeper search to be applied.
Matefish – a variant which delivers a similar functionality to Houdini’s tactical mode.
Komodo – probably the most configurable engine, “off the shelf”
CorChess - A Stockfish variant with a number of developments related mainly to a more effective search method
Thinksfish – Another Stockfish variant, with a massive number of adjustable parameters and a special “correspondence mode”
CIFish – a combination of CFish (faster Stockfish variant) and CorChess
All of these are a big step in the right direction for CC players and well worth a place in your engine stable………
There are a number of other improvements which are possible but we will talk about the “Blueprint” another time!
