Can a chess engine play like Morphy?

A word to the wise - If you're on the fence whether or not to download one of these engines, go ahead and do it. Links to some of these obscure engines sometimes just disappear into nothingness.

Sounds like good advice.   i just got a book about how Tal played, The Magic Tactics of Tal.  Reading the first few pages, seems he played the wild sac games at a very young age, about 12-13.  Thanks again.  

I decided to try out the Rebel Century UCI engine with the Tal personality. (To set up the Tal personality, you first have to edit the wb2uci.eng file slightly using a standard text editor.)

To edit the wb2uci.eng file to allow selection of the "Michael Tal" personality in the engine configuration window of your GUI, you'll have to change this line:

Personality=setvar personality personal\%s.eng|combo|century|century|Strong Club Player|Average Club Player|Absolute Novice Player|Q3 - Tactical Engine

to this line:

Personality=setvar personality personal\%s.eng|combo|century|century|Michael Tal|Strong Club Player|Average Club Player|Absolute Novice Player|Q3 - Tactical Engine

The Tal personality drops the engine's strength probably 300 points, from the 2500's down to maybe the 2200's. I don't know if the engine really plays like Tal did, but you're not going to be bored watching the games!

Here's a couple of sample games. (These are two wins - The Tal personality does lose a lot of games too!)

And game 2:

lol,   Thanks Escher, both games simply amazing!  That first game, sac'ing the Q at the end. . . not to mention all the sac plays.  Yessir, i'd say it plays quite a bit like Tal.  Thanks for sharing.    

Sorry for responding late but the gluarung chess computer interest meet but every UCI try It ends up playing like a normal computer how did you make the chess engines aggressive and how do you make them play against each other 

Hi. Sorry, but I'm not quite sure exactly what you're asking. I also don't know which platform and GUI you're using.

In the above games, I was using the Arena 3.5 GUI for the PC, along with the two Rebel engines and the Phalanx engine. Once the engines were installed in Arena, I had to set up an engine-engine tournament to get them to play each other.

The Glaurung engine is written by a different programmer than the Rebel engines. Glaurung is an aggressive engine, and it also has a separate aggressiveness setting that can be changed, but I don't know how aggressive the Glaurung engine is compared to the two Rebel engines. The author of the Rebel engines, Ed Schröder, created special "Tal" settings for these Rebel engines.

It was tested in 2013 ( in a chess life article) and it was said that Rybka was 3% better than Morphy.

I was using Arena 3.5 Download Glaurung Engine and when put it into play against me in Arena 3.5 it played very "Computer - Like" Although I ampt up its Aggressivness to 300 (Max).Can you try doing what I did and see if it is aggressive and if it works tell em the steps you took. 

Take a look and see how "aggressiveness" is defined by the engine. Many have it exactly backwards when it comes to trades. If your program seeks trades, it's not aggressive. In fact, it would play more like Capa than Tal or Morphy.

Also, in order to play like Morphy, you would have to dial the Elo strength down to ~2400 tops.

While Glaurung is a somewhat aggressive engine, I believe that it's a more "normal" engine than the "Rebel-Tal" engines. In fact, Glaurung is the predecessor to the Stockfish engine. I wouldn't be too surprised if Glaurung at its max aggressive setting is still very computer-like.

Woops found a fix also I wouldent call it "computer like " at max.

This a Best out of 3 Tournament I set up to test Glaurung's aggressivness against Spike 1.4

Wether the less the loses amazing games.(Analysis done by Gualrung at 300 aggressivness

I suppose if you really wanted to nerf your engine, you could probably get it to play like a Morphy or a Tal. 

There's a fairly recent Tal-like UCI engine named OpenTal, which is based on Pawel Koziol's Rodent III engine. The personality parameters were created by Brendan Norman. Engine users are raving about the Tal-like sacrifices of this engine! It plays only at full strength, which is in the range of 2500 to 2600 elo, and the parameters are not adjustable. Of course, top engines will maul OpenTal, but remember that OpenTal was created to play against humans. However, you CAN have it play against other 2500-ish engines and watch the fireworks begin!

You can download the engine here:
http://www.pkoziol.cal24.pl/opental/

The main download link is for OpenTal 1.1. You can also download OpenTal 1.0, but there were some problems getting ver 1.0 to run in some GUIs. Installation of OpenTal is straightforward and easy; Just install it as you would any UCI engine.

For some background reading, try these links:

http://www.chessncognac.com/opental-chess-engine/

http://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=66042

http://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=66248

If you want to play a weakened Tal with this engine, you can't use OpenTal - You'd have to use the Rodent III ver 0.275 engine and modify the personality settings and opening book. Setting up the weakened version of this engine is messy, as numerous installation tweaks are required. Here are some notes that might keep you from going down some dead ends:

Although these Rodent III downloads are described as Version 0.273, some of the downloads are actually Version 0.275. Specifically, the recent AppVeyor build and the full package are Version 0.275, while the smaller Windows pack is Version 0.273.

Version 0.273 should not be used, as about one in ten or fifteen games is a time forfeit. Version 0.275 fixed this time forfeit problem by introducing a UCI option "TimeTricks", which should be left in the default "false" (unchecked) setting.

For the default (non-Tal) full-strength Rodent III settings, the UCI "PersonalityFile" setting should be left blank, and the engine will use its internal "default.txt" settings. (The default settings are internal to the engine executable file, and the actual "default.txt" file should not be used.)

IMPORTANT - The engine author made a mistake with the distribution. There is a spurious "rodent.txt" file in the engine folder; This file is actually a binary file, and if it is left in the engine folder, it will force the engine to play with the old set of parameters. Therefore, the "rodent.txt" file should be deleted.

I could NOT get the "SHOW_OPTIONS" feature to work in the "basic.ini" file. (Note that "HIDE_OPTIONS" is needed if using personality files.) I'm guessing that "SHOW_OPTIONS" doesn't work in this version, and I'm also guessing that any changes to the default settings would have to be made via changes to personality files.

If Rodent III Version 0.275 is used to run the "Tal" personality (tal2.txt, by Brendan J. Norman), delete the "guide.bin" file from the engine folder, then add the "tal2.txt" file to the engine folder, then add the "rodent.bin" opening book to the "books" subfolder located below the engine folder, then add the "ph-tal2.bin" opening book (by Pawel Hase) to the "books\players" subfolder located below the engine folder, and finally, add tal2.txt (AND THE FULL FILENAME PATH) to the UCI "PersonalityFile" setting.

Note that the Tal personality file by Brendan J. Norman (tal2.txt) and the Tal opening book (ph-tal2.bin) were obtained from the GitHub master download file (Rodent_III-master.zip), located at this link: https://github.com/nescitus/Rodent_III/archive/master.zip

For very weak Tal settings, the "ph-tal2.bin" opening book may contain more plies than you'd like. In that case, you could try using the "micro.bin" opening book, remembering to also change the book name in the "tal2.txt" file.

To specify the weakened settings for the Tal personality, you could try changing the "NpsLimit" and "EvalBlur" options in the "tal2.txt" file using the values shown in the last table of the Rodent III manual.