Computer level

What computer level do you feel best emulates human play? As be as my rating is I just beat computer on level 4(1000) using both black and white. I got excited and went and played a human and got tossed around as usual. I know no computer can truly replace human play but I can't keep playing humans until my ranking is zero. I've tried the analyzer and it told me I have blunders yet I was given the same situation and I remembered their suggestion yet during analysis I was told that was a blunder and the move I made in the game was correct. I don't know. I just need to find a way to simulate play without actually playing. otherwise my rating will be zero.

Just keep on playing games against humans until your rating is 0 then learn and get better.

I'm trying to get better. I'm doing lessons on here and I started yesterday working with Polgar's 5334 Problems, Combinations & Games.

Well than you will eventually get better and your rating won’t drop to zero the point is there’s no computer that can replace a human. How far your rating drops doesn’t matter as long as you learn which you will against humans but most likely won’t against a computer.

Well, when I started to play chess on this website, I played from 1, then I added on levels and on level 5 I realized that playing vs computer is not good, the computer is algorithmic. When you play vs human, it´s the game how it´s supposed to be. People do mistakes, so it makes chances for a win or for advantage. I realized that I learn more of the game against a human than of the game with the computer. So if you wanna learn something play vs human and then analyze game (mistakes, search better moves and improve tactics, whatever you need).

This is one of the best computer to play against human.

Lots of personalities, varieties of play and also lots of interactive learning courses, master games etc.

https://www.amazon.com/Chessmaster-Grandmaster-Linux/dp/B000SL4ANE

When I start playing here, I am rated 1800+, mainly due to playing against computers. 

In my experience, the closest an engine gets to human play is at max level. There is a slew of engines on the internet with lower ratings. I think the weakest are a somewhere around 1500 to 1600 elo.

I'm generally commenting on sub 2000 elo settings. I can't really evaluate an engine level I have little chance of winning against.

Chessmaster program was long discontinued even before Windows 10. I could not get it to run on Windows 10

Sadly I've yet to see a chess program that comes close to Chessmaster Grandmaster in both the look and feel of it, let alone out do it.

I noticed a vast difference between level s 5 & 6 this morning. level 5 a sac was ignored half the time. level 6 I ended up playing suicidal lol.

That plus computers don't suffer from memory slips like humans do which is decisively inconvenient especially when against a human you could open up a discovered attack or pressure em. Unfortunately computers don t suffer w/ nerves and the better the computer, it s almost as if error disappears entirely. In my own words it s like playing against a psychopath... one that can foresee mate in 22 whilst we are stuck to our limitations

One problem I just had is I played someone who is better than me. I resigned to how as much. I started new game and its the same dude. Didn't want to play him again so I resigned. Now he's challenging me to a game. I decline and challenges again. Let's be clear. I'm not going to sit hear pad peoples stats just becuz theyre better than me. That's ridiculous if that's the expectation of internet chess. If that's the case I'm out.

You can block players you don't want to interact with.

A few miscellaneous comments:

 

Chessmaster was really good for its tutorials. The Chessmaster engines were less impressive - Lots of personalities, but most of them were decidedly NOT human-like.

 

Regarding the use of weak engines at their maximum strength (for example, a weak 1200 elo engine that only plays at its full strength). Keep in mind that many of these engines are buggy; They're created by very amateur programmers who introduce lots of bugs.

 

Regarding dumbed-down engines, I think the landscape here is slowly improving. More and more of these dumbed-down engines are using LimitStrength algorithms that do two things - They limit the number of nodes searched, and they introduce an amount of randomness that tries to emulate occasional blunders and inaccuracies. Limiting the number of nodes searched guarantees that the engine won't be making grandmaster moves on a regular basis. In this category, try out the free Delfi Trainer 5.4 at 1000 elo. If that's too strong, try the free Arasan 21.4 at 1000 elo. And if that's too strong, try out the free Ufim 8.02 at 900 elo. (Ufim can go even lower than 900 elo, but at its very low elo levels, the moves tend to be a bit stupid.)

http://www.msbsoftware.it/delfi/

https://arasanchess.org/

https://web.archive.org/web/20140329072350/http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/html/details1/Ufim.html

 

Imho, probably the two best human-like engines are HIARCS 14 (commercial, contained in the HIARCS Chess Explorer GUI) and Delfi (commercial, but no longer available, except for the free, crippled version linked above).

For anyone interested in my personal list of engines which support a minimal ELO:

You can run ChessMaster 9000 and GM editions in window 10. 

In fact window 10 has backward compatability.

So it can run programs that can run in window 95, and some overy old MS-DOS programs.

You might want to strike Spike 1.4 from your list, as its LimitStrength feature is broken. There was a discussion about it in this thread:

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-equipment/chess-engine-closest-to-human-in-playing-style