Fritz (chess)

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Fritz 8 - end of game between Fritz and Fruit 2.2.1 on 3-D board

Fritz is a German chess program developed by Frans Morsch and Mathias Feist.

Morsch and his friend Ed Schröder produced a chess program in the early 1980s. In the early '90s, the German company ChessBase asked Morsch to write the Fritz chess programs (called Knightstalker in the USA). In 1995, Fritz 3 won the computer World Championship in Hong Kong, surprisingly beating a prototype version of Deep Blue.

In 2002, a version of Fritz specifically designed for multi-processing, Deep Fritz, drew the Brains in Bahrain match against the classical World Chess Champion Vladimir Kramnik 4 - 4. In November 2003, X3D Fritz, a version of the program with a 3D interface, drew a four-game match against Garry Kasparov.

A Pocket PC version called Pocket Fritz 2 is actually based upon Shredder, a engine written by Stefan Meyer-Kahlen. There used to be a feature that allowed games to be downloaded from the ChessBase website. It has stopped working, presumably due to changes in the ChessBase database or web server. Fixing it is not apparently a high priority at ChessBase, as an email[1] sent to Dr. David Kirkby on 29th August 2006 from Peter Schreiner of ChessBase showed. It read in part, "The feature does not have a high priority, but it should naturally work."

Fritz is also used in the Fritz and Chesster series of introductory chess software.

On June 23, 2005, in the ABC Times Square studios, the AI Accoona Toolbar, driven by a Fritz 9 prototype, drew against the then FIDE World Champion Rustam Kasimdzhanov. On the September 10, 2006 SSDF rating list, Fritz 9.0 placed sixth with a rating of 2811, six points below Shredder 9.0, and 113 points below #1 ranked Rybka 1.2.

On October 4, 2006, in the course of the FIDE World Chess Championship 2006 between Vladimir Kramnik and Veselin Topalov, Topalov's manager Silvio Danailov issued a press release including what it labeled "coincidence statistics" between the play of Kramnik and moves recommended by the Fritz 9 software.^[1] Given Danailov's previous characterization of Kramnik's frequent bathroom visits as "strange, if not suspicious", this was widely interpreted as a tacit accusation of Kramnik cheating through the use of the Fritz sofware. However, the Danailov press release did not offer Topalov's own percentages for comparison. Moreover, subsequent analysis showed that, using similar statistics, one might imply that the Cuban chess legend José Raúl Capablanca cheated using Chessmaster 9000 software back in 1918 ^[2] - decades before the first computers were built.

On November 25, 2006 Deep Fritz began a six game match against Kramnik in Bonn. Fritz was able to win 4-2.^[3]

The latest version of the consumer product is Fritz 10.