Scid vs PC

After my old PC died I have forked out for a fairly high spec "gaming" PC.

As a result, I no longer have Fritz (I was on version 10) and I'm thinking about opting for SCID vs PC instead - this is for analysis, not to play against.

Does anyone know if SCID vs PC is still being maintained? I looked at the website and the latest entry in "News" is from 2017.

The graphics card in my new PC is sufficient for running Fat Fritz, should I choose to. Would I be able to have lc0 or whatever it's called running in SCID vs PC and have it take advantage of the graphics card?

Not only is Scid vs. PC still being developed, but the developer periodically pops in on the Scid vs. PC threads here. I think his handle is stevenaaus.

Thanks for that.

The thing I found most useful with Fritz was to step through a game on "infinite analysis" mode and have it tell me the best 10  moves each with their principal line and evaluation.

Do you know if I can do that with SCIDvsPC?

No idea. I actually don't use Scid vs. PC very much.

Although, based on my foggy memory, I think it may be able to do that.

I just tried it (Linux version). Yep, it can do that.

Thank you very much! You're the man!

How do you install Leela (lc0.exe) with Scid vs PC? I have had no problems installing Stockfish 10 and 11 in it, but lc0 obviously needs a less intuitive installation on Windows 10 64-bit, and the installation help on the web for lc0 is not very helpful. Look at this: https://blog.lczero.org/2018/09/guide-setting-up-leela-on-chess-gui.html They're writing about binary and a neural net weight file, very interesting – not.

Maybe more updated guidance: https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0/wiki/Getting-Started

The important thing to take away from that blog is that you need a good graphics card to get lc0 to be useful.

True, but some of the smaller nets are getting better for cpu-only PCs. I have an older Intel cpu (i3) without a dedicated GPU. With the older nets and older versions of lc0, I was only able to get about 2300 elo (based on my fuzzy memory).

However, I recently tried the 0.24.0-rc1 version of lc0 with the T591215 net, and I was getting about +150 elo over Tornado 7.0 (probably 2900 + elo?)

Download link for the T591215 neural net:

https://training.lczero.org/get_network?sha=b8a3f8772aedd3187f486abc470c09e4009d710f90d2dada71522ffeefaa84c0

Of course, if you have a dedicated GPU card, you'll get hundreds of extra rating points.

Thanks EscherehcsE, I wasn't aware of that - I thought it was complete garbage without a GPU.

Thanks for all the help! My graphics card is an Intel HD Graphics 620 card and it doesn't support CUDA, so I guess that I'm better off with the very positional Stockfish 11 engine. I'm mostly using it as an opening explorer anyway (and analyzing my games played on the Play Magnus application).

Btw my antivirus software clearly doesn't like the client.exe that comes packed with Leela downloads and I have to rename the file to get it past the antivirus and into the bin/engine directory of Scid.

Have you tried the lc0---windows-opencl.zip download? (for non-Nvidia GPUs).

Also, the client program is only needed if you're contributing to the neural nets. If you're just playing or analyzing, you don't need it.

Yes, I have tried it. When installing and starting the engine in Scid it just displays Lc0 v0.24.1+git.4b8acf (and so on) in the engine window header, but no moves are recommended, the main window where moves should be recommended and evaluated is blank, and everything in engine info is 0 (as in Alpha Zero).

I don't really know what I'm talking about, but openings that seem to work for me against d4 is e.g. Grunfeld and King's Indian. They more or less play themselves, while e.g. defending the closed positional Ruy Lopez with e5 is a real slog of memorization work, Be7, castle, b-pawn before d-pawn, then Na5 or Bb7 or Nb8 then Nbd7 etc. or I'll easily blunder a pawn in the center. Thankfully, my memorization skills are pretty decent.

YES.

Scid vs PC can do many things like Chessbase products, and I strongly recomend ScidvsPC for You. I discovered it few years ago and since than I mostly use it. I am about to write one review on this application which was prepared for some other blog but not published yet, since it deserves one good review.

Good options are Arena Chess and ChessX too. Arena has some drawbacks in handling with pgns (long databases), but good. ChessX is simplified type of Scid, also good and stable, but not so powerful.