Has anyone tried the Friend mode in Fritz 18? Does it emulate human play realistically enough to be useful for training? I have Fritz 13, and have used Sparring mode which plays a game giving the user tactical opportunities along the way. Sparring mode was replaced with Friend mode in Fritz 15 onwards, and I was wondering if Friend mode provides tactical opportunities (as would arise in a human game) as opposed to the highly position perfect play followed by a random blunder that typically results from playing a detuned engine. If anyone has tried training against the weak engines in Lucas Chess, I would also be interested in your opinions about that.
I can't give an opinion on Fritz, since the only Fritz GUI/engine I ever owned was Fritz 8.
Regarding the training issue, I think it's less important whether you're playing a person or an engine; It's more important that you're studying tactics, strategy, and general principles, and that you're using your games to see if you've learned what you've studied. And the only way that you know whether you're learning is to analyze your games after you've played them, regardless of whether it's a game against a person or engine. (Most people recommend that you first analyze a game by yourself without an engine, then a second time with an engine.)
Of course, my first preference is to play against people, but if I'm playing against an engine, I *do* prefer to play against an engine that plays human-like moves.
You gave your opinion that dumbed-down engines have "highly position perfect play followed by a random blunder that typically results from playing a detuned engine". Maybe it's possible that some engines do that, but the engines I enjoy playing against definitely *don't* do that. I like to play against the commercial engines Delfi Trainer 5.4 (no longer available except for the demo version), HIARCS, and to a lesser extent, Shredder. I also like to play against the freeware Maia/Lc0 engine. Imho, these engines have the most natural, human-like moves of any engines I've tried. And, these engines, on their weakest levels, don't play "position perfect moves", because they don't use any CPU resources. If you use the Windows Task Manager to watch the CPU power that the engine uses, these engines only look a couple of plies deep and use ZERO CPU power. Therefore, they can't be calculating anything of significance. (The Maia/Lc0 engine doesn't calculate anything; It only uses the Maia neural networks, which were created from games of real people.)
For information, the Lucas Chess GUI for Windows and Linux contains the Maia/Lc0 bots, and the Lucas Chess GUI for Windows also contains the Delfi Trainer 5.4 demo engine (1000 ELO).
Has anyone tried the Friend mode in Fritz 18? Does it emulate human play realistically enough to be useful for training? I have Fritz 13, and have used Sparring mode which plays a game giving the user tactical opportunities along the way. Sparring mode was replaced with Friend mode in Fritz 15 onwards, and I was wondering if Friend mode provides tactical opportunities (as would arise in a human game) as opposed to the highly position perfect play followed by a random blunder that typically results from playing a detuned engine. If anyone has tried training against the weak engines in Lucas Chess, I would also be interested in your opinions about that.