FRITZ, DEEP FRITZ software

FRITZ, DEEP FRITZ software The chess program was “born” in November 1991 in the offices of ChessBase.  In 1985, the Hamburg-based company had developed a computer program for recording and saving chess matches, a revolutionary concept back then.  Fritz, however, was the first real chess program in the ChessBase product line that would make a spectacular entrance on the world stage.  Fritz notched up the first major success in its meteoric career in Hong Kong, at the Computer Chess World Championship.  Fritz, a floppy-based program running on a normal 386 PC, defeated Deep Blue in the deciding match and in May 1995 became the first PC software program in the history of computer chess to be named the World Champion.  Soon, everybody was talking about Fritz’s powerful game.  The top players began to take the new challenger seriously and Fritz continued to notch up more wins, emerging victorious from high-calibre tournaments over the next several years.  Then, in October 2002, Fritz entered one of the most formidable competitions in its career.  It squared off against World Champion Vladimir Kramnik in Bahrain.  Kramnik captured a two-match lead, but Deep Fritz turned the tables on the World Champion in the next two games: the competition ended with a 4:4 tie.  In October 2004, the Man versus Machine Team Championship came to Bilbao.  Fritz’s computer team pulled off a resounding 8.5:3.5 victory.  Their competitors were internationally top-seeded players and Fritz, who faced these world-class players on a garden-variety notebook, garnered the best individual score.  In December 2005, Fritz (Version 9) won the German Game Developer Award and received second place for the most innovative technology.  In 2006, in a U.S. $1,000,000 contest, Deep Fritz (version 10) defeated the World Champion, Kramnik 4:2.  On a standard 2 GHz notebook, Fritz calculated around 1.5 million positions a second.  The new version of Deep Fritz was running on a computer with four processors.  On this machine, Deep Fritz computed around eight to ten million positions a second.  This was three times faster than in Bahrain 2002, which was the last time it faced off against Kramnik.