Jonny Chess Engine

     When my Chess Life arrived the other day I went to about the only column I ever read, Chess To Enjoy by Andy Soltis, and in it I noticed a diagram from a game where Jonny defeated Komodo in 158 (!) moves in the 2015 ICGA Computer World Championship. Naturally I was curious about any engine that could defeat Komodo, so I checked it out. Visit site 
     Today there are only two really good engines, Stockfish and Komodo, but Jonny won the World Computer Chess Championship. How could that be?! It turns out this tournament is a totally absurd engine tournament for a faux title. You see, Jonny was running on a cluster at the University of Bayreuth using 2,400 cores.
     The order of finish and number of cores were: 1-Jonny (2400), 2-Komodo (24), 3-Hiarcs (not listed), 4-Protector (8), 5-Shredder (8), 6-Ginkgo (6), 7-The Baron (16), 8-Maverick (not listed) and 9-Fridolin (not listed). 
     All of which is pretty meaningless for a couple of reasons. First, the real computer championship is the TCEC because the engines are running on the same hardware. Jonny is strong compared to humans, but as far as engines go, as just one example, on the CCLR Rating 40/40 List Jonny is way down the list...number 57. Second, even though Jonny beat Komodo in their one game that's meaningless. Komodo ran on 24 cores and Jonny ran on 2400 cores. Who has that many cores on their home laptop?! As Dennis Monokroussos said so well on his Blog, “...the Jonny programmers should be congratulated on their superior ability to buy or rent computer hardware.” 
     The most recent (windows) version of Jonny can be downloaded HERE and I was still interested in trying it out on my laptop. For whatever reason it would not load on my Fritz 12 GUI and so it got deleted. As it should have; it's not that good anyway. 
     Here's an interesting game where Stockfish beat Jonny.