Fritz Chess 17 (Steam Edition)

At the turn of the century, Fritz fascinated the chess world with victories over Garry Kasparov and then-reigning World Champion Vladimir Kramnik. The "most popular chess program" (according to German magazine Der Spiegel) offers you everything you will need as a dedicated chess enthusiast, with innovative training methods for amateurs and professionals alike.

The neural chess engine "Fat Fritz"

In December 2017, a press release from Google shook the chess world to the core: its subsidiary Deep Mind built a neural network, dubbed Alpha Zero, which "learned" chess solely by playing millions of games against itself, yet was strong enough to beat Stockfish 8, a leading chess engine. This news was sobering and fascinating at the same time. Sobering in the sense that the decades old tradition of chess programming had been relegated to the shadows by a self-learning system. Fascinating because it was possible to hope that one could learn really new stuff about chess from this radical approach.

.

Nobody had expected that a cooperative effort by chess developers would soon make this technology generally available. The Open-Source- Project LCZero began to retrace the trail blazed by Google and in the meantime has acquired considerable strength. Suddenly a chess engine was available whose different analysis results provided new ideas on all fronts. LCZero too follows the Google philosophy, that the neural network only learns from games played against itself. 

The idea soon came to use our existing base of hundreds of thousands of good grandmaster games to shorten this learning process. This approach was followed logically by our longserving technical editor Albert Silver and based on the LCZero technology he trained a neural network for a whole year with GM games.…