Buying an engine for your own use

I have heard recently that some people buy their own engine like houdini, fritz etc. My question is do a lot of you by your own engines and just use that or do you just tend to use a free one on a website? Also is there any real benefit to buying your own engine?

First, most people buy Fritz for the interface and other functions as opposed to buying it for the engine. Then you can run free engines like Stockfish within it.

Second, I have purchased both Fritz 16 and Komodo 12. I like the various skill levels in Komodo for playing against as an opponent and I like the style of game it plays.

But certainly it is possible to go all free. For example, I like Lucas Chess as a free interface and it comes with many different engines including Stockfish.

I have been looking at fritz and houdini and been wondering if there are any other ones that contend other than the free stockfish and why people tend to buy the engines? What reasoning do you use to decide its worth it to part the cash for the engine for your own use like that, I'm on the fence and need some convincing.

I bought Komodo because it played in a distinctly different way from Fritz and from Stockfish, I'm interested in computer chess, and I could easily afford it.

Many people buy Fritz for the reasons I already mentioned. It is a very good interface with a nice set of features.

Would either of you recommend the engines you bought? Also when you talk about the interface what features are offered in the interface that makes you mention it specifically? I have been looking into specifically Fritz 16, Rybka 4 and Houdini 6 (they were in the top results on amazon when i searched for chess engines to buy) if anyone knows anything about any of these or could advise on how you choose between engines that would be helpful. Thanks

Don't pay for an engine. In most years the highest rated engines are free. Right now you can download stockfish for free.

You can also download an interface for free, like SCID or Arena.

FWIW I never use an engine from a website except to briefly check a move from a blitz game or something like this... but even then, if I'm earnestly interested in the position, I put it into stockfish on my PC.

http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/

Engines listed by strength.

Orange and green ones are free.

But people (usually pros) buy other engines because some engines are better in specific types of positions, and since their peers are using multiple engines to prepare they don't want to be left out.

Other people buy multiple engines because they play ICCF, which is a correspondence chess that allows engine use (and before you ask, no, the people who blindly follow the engine moves don't make it very high).

Fritz was #1 like... 15 years ago. Rybka was #1 maybe 10 years ago.

Komodo and Houdini have sometimes been #1 during the last few years. These days the free stockfish is #1, but if you want to buy one, Komodo and Houdini are the strongest purchasable engines.

My interface is chessbase, which is (as far as chess software goes) pretty expensive. I primarily like it because of the database, but it has a lot of other useful features... some I don't even know how to use correctly

Thanks for your comments Stiggling. After you mentioned a new engine I hadn't mentioned in my earlier comments I took a quick look at the latest komodo engine called komodo 12. The description is interesting it seem its a strong engine with a playing strength over 3400 but with this version they have also implemented a second engine which is not quite as strong as the classical komodo engine but this is the monte carlo komodo and from the description it sounds like its trying to play like a lot of the neural networks we have seen recently by playing a lot of games against itself and basing its evaluation of the position on the statistical results of those games and it says that the 2 engines play in a very different fashion too. I kind of like the idea of having available a strong classical engine and also a kind of neural network engine that is playing in a different way, that seems interesting. I don't think we can buy any of the proper neural networks can we? I bet loads of people would have bought alpha zero if they could.

Leela is replica of Alpha Zero, with identical neural network structure and identical training. One tester claimed Leela is even +2 elo stronger than Alpha Zero( in case both running in same hardware)

https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0/wiki/Getting-Started

To run leela,  minimum requirement is $ 250 1060 GTX, GPU.

Yeah, Monte Carlo search is interesting, but the only neural network type engine other than Alpha Zero is Leela chess Zero, which is open source and free, but I'm not clear on what it takes to run it on a PC, or how strong it is on a normal PC.

@drmrboss is a big fan of leela though, he could probably tell you about it.

Oh, you beat me to it.

Also lol @ them claiming it's 2 Elo stronger. I don't know... I feel as if that's like me claiming I'm two millimeters taller than someone.

Do you recommend Leela over any other available chess engine?  

This may sound dumb, but what's the benefit of playing a chess engine when you're rated in the 1500's, let's say, and Leela is rated 3300+?

I would purchase Fritz again, and I would purchase Komodo again. Of course you can purchase Komodo with the Fritz interface. The Fritz engine itself is signficantly weaker than the best by today's standards.

Basically, you purchase Fritz for the interface. It is most useful if you actually want to play against the engine and have a need for its somewhat dumbed down database capabilities (compared to say Chessbase).

As for Komodo, it can use a monte carlo search but it does NOT use a neural network. LC0 does. LC0 is free but requires the hardware mentioned above to be competitive. I have it as well.

I personally like having a variety of strong engines. It is fun to compare them, and I have an interest in computer chess. But for most people, all you really need is one strong engine, and Stockfish is an obvious choice.

So would you recommend the komodo 12 (which does come with fritz 16 interface) then over say stockfish due to the potential variety like playing the classical engine and the monte carlo version too?

If I was going to purchase a version of the "Fritz" interface today, I would purchase the Komodo version.

But you can get plenty of variety without paying for any version of Fritz. LC0 for example can be run without any graphics acceleration albeit at a much reduced playing strength.

Really, and I keep repeating this, the only reason I would purchase Fritz packaged with some engine is for the interface. I like that interface, and I like it significantly better than the free options I have tried. And I would purchase it only if I was playing against the computer. For other uses, I think there is better out there.

You will likely have no benefit at all using Leela, but you will make Nvidia richer.

I use Stockfish dev (actually I was using ASMFish, but it seems that its development has stalled) on an ordinary "old" 4+4 cores i7 4790K, and I see no reason for using something else for any possible uswage (serious competitive correspondence chess included).

Wait, CPU are not free! If you upgrade from 4 to 16, 32 CPU, you will make Intel or AMD richer too!!

why buy one? you have a free one on chess.com