Fritz (chess)
chess software
Fritz is a German chess program originally developed for Chessbase by Frans Morsch based on his Quest program, ported to DOS, and then Windows by Mathias Feist. With version 13, Morsch retired, and his engine was first replaced by Gyula Horvath's Pandix, and then with Fritz 15, Vasik Rajlich's Rybka. Fritz 17 switched to the Ginkgo engine, written by Frank Schneider.
The latest version of the consumer product is Fritz 19. This version supports 64-bit hardware and multiprocessing by default.
History
In 1991, the German company ChessBase approached the Dutch chess programmer Frans Morsch about writing a chess engine to add to the database program which they sold. Morsch adapted his Quest program, and ChessBase released it for sale that year as Knightstalker in the U.S. and Fritz throughout the rest of the world. In 1995, Fritz 3 won the World Computer Chess Championship in Hong Kong, beating an early version of Deep Blue. This was the first time that a program running on a consumer-level microcomputer defeated the mainframes that had previously dominated this event.
In 1998, Fritz 5 was released including a Friend mode which would cause the engine to adjust its strength of play over the course of a game based on the level the opponent appeared to be playing.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fritz (chess)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.