chess engine closest to human in playing style

In your openion which chess engine plays/thinks like humans,may not be the strongest.

its been a while since I bought one but the older chessmaster platform allowed you to configure the engine and you could make it pretty human. 

What you need to do really is be able to configure it so that it randomly picks from the top moves (say within .25 score of the best move), has a limited search depth (say 5 or 6 for 1600 or so level play??), book, database and mate-search are disabled. You may also like to have things like "treat draw as (win, loss)" options, piece value adjustment (bishop 3.5 vs knight 3.0 for example, or queen 8 or 8.5 or 9 or even 10 these things make huge differences). 

Not sure which of the current ones have all these config options....   but that is what you are looking for.

I have Chessmaster,  and it's characters definitely have human weaknesses.  I also use Fritz 13 with Powerbook 13, which you can really reduce it's playing strength so that it will make human mistakes.  If I can set it low enough for me to defeat,  then it should be good for anyone.

I feel Stockfish feels more humanlike than other engines I have tried.

I own Hiarcs on PC and Shredder on iPad and they are both enjoyable at low levels.

Here is a list of free engines "elo adjustable", perhaps you may find them good tweaking the level:

Amyan 1.72

Black Mamba 1.4

Glass 2.0 (with personalities)

Horizon 4.4

Naraku 1.4

Rybka 2.3.2a

SlowChess 2.960e

Spike 1.4

Ufim 8.02

Amongst those the strongest is Spike which is usually very well rated.

manishsangwan, why do you wish to know which computer plays/thinks most like humans?

Maybe Spike 1.4 is among the strongest in this list because the limit strength feature is broken in that version.

Is it really broken or you are just assuming ?

btw, I was referring to the full strength, reference here:

http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/404/

Oh, I didn't realize that you were referring to its full strength.

Regarding the broken limit strength, I wasn't assuming or joking. When Spike 1.4 was released, I tried out its LS feature, and I couldn't get it to work. My suspicions were confirmed by this Talkchess thread. (Spike's author confirms this in the last post on Page 6.)

http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=37915&postdays=0&postorder=asc&topic_view=flat&start=50

lol, perhaps you are thinking what I am thinking right now ... 

I go and read it, because I've got suspicious as well:

This is a little tournament in Arena I made with Tomcat opening book and 6 seconds per move: 

http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/9943/4lad.png

Usurpator II is rated 1147 and TRex 1277 in the same list above ..

I'm just amazed that Spike gave up a draw!

Me too .. the game ended here, white to play (Spike) .. 0.0

That makes no sense...Spike is clearly winning.

That's why, back into the topic, i do prefer HIARCS !! ^^

And comes with a nice gui as well.

By definition -- none of them.

don't you fear aliens and robots ? ;)

I almost have to believe that this was some kind of Arena adjudication bug.

I feel the same. Anywy, matching engines is kind of fun.

---

manishsangwan, I already realized by myself online playing with opponents of similar experience is much better. Anyway, this world is plenty of engines. Maybe too much.

TheBigDecline, you don't possibly mean to say you think manishsangwan wants to CHEAT with this information, do you?