The Fish vs. the Dragon

    There is a lot of debate on engine use when it comes to studying and I am only offering these resources in case some readers are not aware of what’s available.

    Stockfish (currently version 16.1) is the world’s strongest engine. On the CCLR rating list an experimental version (Stockfish 20230613 64-bit 4CPU) is ranked first and Dragon by Komodo 3.3 64-bit 4CPU is third. 

    The current version of Dragon can be downloaded for $74.98, but you can download free older versions of Komodo and Dragon from the site HERE. 

    Late in 2020, Komodo Chess released Dragon, which was derived from Komoso and it featured the use of neural networks in its evaluation function. My limited understanding is that a neural network is a method that teaches computers to process data in a way that is inspired by the human brain. The claim is that Dragon plays in a more human-like style because it relies on learning what actually works in games rather than just on pre-assigned values for eval terms. Read more 

    The Komodo site also offers a free download of Komodo 14. Besides the “regular” version it has different “personalities": Active, Aggressive, Beginner, Defensive, Endgame, Human, Monte Carlo, and Positional. 

    I ran a 4 minute + 2 seconds per move match and Stockfish 16.1 defeated the free Dragon by Komodo by a score of +3 -0 =9. Using the same time limit Stockfish scored +3 -0 =0 in s short match agsinst the Human version of Komodo 14.