Anonymous made reference to the above program so I went to the site. I have not heard of WinFinder or this site before. Here is a link to the site he mentions: HERE. Apparently it contains downloads to about every engine you can think of plus a lot of other related material. I was not familiar with WinFinder and discovered this site: WinFinder
The site gives the following information:
Overview
As its name implies, Rybka WinFinder can be used to look for wins. It can spot and evaluate long, complex tactical variations much faster than the normal Rybka engine. If you have some complex position and just want to know if one side can somehow win material or get a clear advantage, this is the tool you want.
Disclaimers
1) Rybka WinFinder 1.0 is a very rough, proof-of-concept stage program. If you are not an expert computer chess user, it is probably better that you leave it alone.
2) Rybka WinFinder is not useful for the analysis of strategic positions.
Intended Use
If you are brave enough to use a program during its first release, you will probably find your own uses for this tool. I envision a situation where users use the normal Rybka engine to analyze chess positions, but if a position needs to be analyzed in which the user suspects that there might be some deep, convincing continuation, he or she switches to the WinFinder to get a faster answer.
This concept sounds interesting but I’m not a computer nerd so truthfully this scares me a little bit! Also it appears that WinFinder itself has been incorporated into Rybka itself. The Rybka website had this to say:
Q. What happened to Rybka WinFinder? A. Many WinFinder ideas made their way into the default Rybka 3, which is now quite strong tactically. In addition, a new "search for score" extension to UCI can further boost Rybka's tactical emphasis at the user's request.
Does anybody have more information on the download Anonymous recommended?
I think they made anything prior to version three as Freeware, so the collection of Rybka "fossils" is OK :)
ReplyDeleteWinfinder when it came out was the best at that time in solving tactical positions fined tuned for that only). Version 2.2 which I think is also on the fossil site was more evolved
But you are right, Rybka 3 & 4 probably have it's strengths included
It is still very good at solving many positions:
http://www.talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=35260&highlight=winfinder
A "Mate" engine I also enjoy is CHEST
http://www.drb.insel.de/~heiner/Chess/index.html
P.S. A number of test suites were performed on many engines. Houdini was #1, but this list does not mean that some of the lower ranked engines did not play some unique chess
ReplyDeletehttp://sites.google.com/site/strategictestsuite/test-results