Chess engine for analysis & which for play?

[guyhayton]

I know I would never ever get into the position of ever beating an "unleashed" computer chess engine.

Curious what people use... as with everything I went though a "buy fest" and purchased Fritz 12, Aquarium 2011 and Chessmaster XI I seem to have settled on Aquarium for general use.

I am looking at Arena for analysis purposes and wondered what engines people use... I hear about Critter being aggressive, Houdini being better in short games etc.

Does anybody swap and change between engines ?

[John Upham]

When forced to use an engine I find Deep Rybka 3 most reliable with Nalimov tablebases installed.

This runs on an HP i7 machine with 4Gb of RAM which provides acceptable performance most of the time.

[Ken Connaughton]

For analysis I use Fritz 11 that comes with the Chessbase program. When I'm trying out opening lines or practicing endgames, I use this other programme I have, Chess Partner. It comes with the Rebel 12 engine, I use it because the programme moves the pieces. I find it less tedious than playing against Fritz where you have to wait for the conclusion and click on the line.

[Colin Patterson]

Of all the frontends I've tried, I 'd rate Arena very high - the freebie engines, Rybka 2.2, Hermann and Ruffian (3 of many that come with it) seem very reasonable too. I added Houdini, as there seemed quite a buzz about it and Peter Svidler uses it (not a bad recommendation!).

Giving Rybka and Houdini the same tough tactical positions to analyse, they rarely disagree, but Houdini usually gets there slightly quicker. Ruffian is interesting - it usually gives the move that I would arrive at myself (on a good day!) and so seems the most 'human' in its behaviour. I recall in the early days of PC chess engines it was HIARCS that took this 'most human' accolade. Not sure where that is on the spectrum these days.

[guyhayton]

interesting... I must get a copy of Arena and look at Ruffian.
Cheers

[Paul Cooksey]

Do any of these engines have a good blindfold option?

I have Stockfish on iPad and Rybka on PC. But the former insists on a move list, and the later puts a small dot in the square even with invisible pieces.