Storyline

At the turn of the century, Fritz fascinated the chess world with victories over Garry Kasparov and then-reigning World Champion Vladimir Kramnik. In December 2017, a neural network was announced, dubbed Alpha Zero, which "learned" chess solely by playing millions of games against itself, yet was strong enough to beat Stockfish 8, a leading chess engine. This news was sobering and fascinating at the same time. Sobering in the sense that the decades old tradition of chess programming had been relegated to the shadows by a self-learning system. Fascinating because it was possible to hope that one could learn really new stuff about chess from this radical approach. Nobody had expected that a cooperative effort by chess developers would soon make this technology generally available. As things stand, Fat Fritz defeats in a direct comparison all traditional chess programs and even LCZero. The moves suggested in analysis are often extremely human and planned. With a painfully practical limitation: Fat Fritz needs (like LCZero) a very high performance Nvidia graphics card (“GPU”) in order to achieve its full playing strength. Nevertheless, here for the rst time in many years we can record a real breakthrough in chess programming. Fat Fritz and LCZero are already beginning to change opening theory.