What are chess engines?

What  chess engines?

A chess-playing program (or a free-standing chess machine). The most well-known ones are Fritz and ChessMaster. They are banned from use on chess.com during play (and trying to use one is likely to get you banned) - except in very specific circumstances: a tournament created for this particular purpose, where all participants are aware that engines are being used. Such games should probably also be unrated.

Since a chess engine allows you to feed in a game position, and it will then calculate the best moves from that position, there can be no argument that it is clearly cheating to use them during play.

They are frequently used to analyse a game, after it has been completed.

Chess engines are useful for playing against, although they nearly always win. If you play from the starting position against an engine, expect to be humbled. you can set up a position that is theoretically won, but with some play, then practice winning it against the computer. Done well, it can be excellent training.

Tactics books are fulll of such problems and the engine will often find a defense that is not in the solution at the back of the book.

Where can we find a discussion of the different chess engines - relative ease of use, ranking, etc., etc.?  I have one called Chess Titans included in the games section in Vista.  Where did it come from?  Was it developed independently?  (I can remember reading Science News 55 years ago (!) and seeing articles about the Eniac computer, which filled a room - and I also remember reading a book about Botvinnik which mentioned that he was interested in the possibility of chess playing computers.  In my callow youth, I thought 'no way!'  So much for my talents as a 'futurologist'.)

 Like this :) http://www.chess.com/computer-workout/

This is not strictly accurate. Fritz and Chessmaster are complete chess applications with GUIs (graphical user interfaces) and databases and all sorts of what-not.

The chess engine specifically, is the chess-playing program at the heart of the larger application. So for example inside Chessmaster is a file called TheKing.exe <---- that's Chessmaster's chess engine. The best chess engine is called Rybka 3.0 -- the engines that power Fritz and Chessmaster are also quite strong -- with Fritz it is very easy to substitute other chess engines (many are freely available online) for the default one.

Arena is a free chess GUI application that is made to accept and utilize chess engines downloaded from around the web.

Yes. Those workouts are the sort of thing I have in mind.

JG27Pyth is correct that it is important to distinguish between the engine and the interface. One of the benefits of the ChessBase family of chess playing programs--Fritz, Junior, even the latest Rybka,--and a weakness of Chessmaster, is that the ChessBase GUI (Fritz 11 is the latest) supports multiple engines, including UCI (Universal Chess Interface) engines.

A few versions of Chessmaster have been advertised as suporting UCI, but there are very few success stories from efforts to install UCI engines in the CM GUI. There are plenty of stories of failed efforts; some of these stories are in the UbiSoft forums, where techies for the company are not much help.

 Thanks for very interesting post.

Where could we buy a chess engine?

Why buy try these free uci chess engines 1=rybka2.2n2rated 2988 2=strelka2.0b rated 2978 3=toga2 1.4beta5c rated 2910  an others like grapefruit clclone stockfish toga2 3.2.1se rated 2931 all rated 2900 plus an these are the single cpu 32bit engines they are even stronger if your computer is 64 bit or multi cpu etc.Start with downloading arena 2.2 the 18 mb  download which is preloaded with rybka 2.2 an several other uci engines plus arena also runs win chess engines so download thinker 5.4 inert ver rated 2940.After you get used to loading engines on arena then download Mayura chessboard 2.1 an Infinity chess or chess assistant 7 light demo what ademo wow it also loads an runs uci engines.An if you have fritz 7 thru 11 they also load an run uci engines.Check out this sites download section an check out Zarkon Fischers great free download site on its links page you will find agreat Russian site where you can download all the top uci an win engines an its the only site i know of where you can download Stelka 2.oas its shuned on most download sites because of claims made against it by the developers of Rybka which verywell be true however for now it gives rybka 2.2 a run for its money on which is the strongest free chess engine.Have fun i run about a 125 free chess engines on about 12 interface platforms playin blitz aginst these top free engines will tune your game .

They're little bitty motors that fit inside chess pieces.

Their use is not permitted on chess.com - in most circumstances. You must move your pieces manually.