Fat Fritz has been redesigned to surpass Stockfish.
Fat Fritz 2.0 sounds like an update. According to its developer Albert Silver it is by and large a new development. It is a neural network that uses the novel NNUE technology, and it is commercially available from Chessbase. Silver maintains that his creation is “arguably the strongest entity that has ever played chess”. In order to understand its significance we need to delve into the recent history of computer chess.
A few years ago, versions of the open-source programme Stockfish were competing with the commercial engines Komodo and Houdini at the top end of the performance spectrum. In late 2017 DeepMind’s AlphaZero lifted chess to another level. Enough about its technology was made public for it to be copied and developed further. LeelaZero was born, the first open source engine based on a neural network. Leela’s emergence also gave a boost to Stockfish, while their competitors fell behind. Commercial engines seemed to be obsolete.
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