Remote Fritz20 and routine to elo-rate chess engines

[Andrea Gatti]

Hey,

Yesterday night I tested the procedure and features of remote engines. I was able to setup and use Fritz 20 AVX2 on my win11 machine from within PicoChess with no issues at all. It took me a few iterations to set it up correctly, but I must say it perfectly works.

Very well done. I'm preparing document (word) which will explain step-by-step how to configure a remote engine. We may then incorporate this into the PicoChess manual, or post it in this group for future reference.

A curiosity then arose, to know what elo rating this Fritz20 reaches on my (old) Intel i5 machine, based on the number of used threads, so that I can create different remote profiles to be used in PicoChess.

With the help of AI (who else) I created a routine that tries to calculate the ccrl-elo of an engine. In short, it is based on the fact that the official ccrl elo of a given engine is calculated having Stockfish 10 (elo and nps speed) as a baseline, on a given, known, CPU. The method therefore consists in running Stockfish 10 on the target machine to time it, and then doing a series of bench tests with the target engine, to eventually derive a ccrl-elo for the new engine, on the new hardware. While not a scientifically precise number, the obtained elo can be considered good enough.

I intend to use a similar approach to elo-rate engines on my overclocked Rpi. I'm progressively moving away from other tools, to eventually use PicoChess as a training device for me, so knowing its engines' ratings becomes important for me, to create meaningful sparring sessions with it.

[Johan Sjöblom]

Wow. Nice work. A minor comment: You can also define the tutor to be on a remote machine which will give you much more quality of the tutor WATCHER feedback. See the picochess.ini, and search for it on this google group, I believe I implemented remote tutor last years December. If the remote tutor is not available it will simply fall back to your normal local tutor (in case your Windows machine is not running). Furthermore the latest turbo buttons we made will be sent to the remote engine, so I allow 4 threads to be sent to the remote tutor at the moment.. we could increase it.

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[Andrea Gatti]

Thank-you.

You're right and thanks for reminding me of the remote tutor. Last night I read about it, but it was pretty late, so I had forgotten about it. I will proceed to configuring remote tutor as well and experiment with it.

AG

[Andrea Gatti]

Configured and perfectly working. Thanks!!

AG

[Luigi Vogliobene]

Grazie Andrea,

I am not able to reach my Windows11 arm via Parallels Desktop (I have an iMac M4) from the RPi5 picochess, I will try later w/ my Windows 11 x64 notebook.

Luigi

Il giorno lunedì 10 agosto 2026 alle 20:48:21 UTC+2 andreag...@gmail.com ha scritto:

Here's attached the manual to create a remote engine and a remote tutor for your consideration.

In the manual I detailed also how to install the ssh server on windows and create a pi user on windows dedicated to the ssh connection.

During my tests I was surprised to see picochess launching two instances of the remote tutor on the windows machine, so after digging a bit I discovered the concept behind it and decided to document this as well.

Hope this is useful, especially to the newcomers.

AG

[Andrea Gatti]

Helli Luigi, not being competent in a mixed networking environment where a VM machine exists, I have asked our belove AI for some hints:

"I think the first thing to check is the Parallels network mode. For the PicoChess remote-engine setup, the Raspberry Pi must be able to reach the Windows VM directly over the LAN and open an SSH connection to it.

If the VM is using Shared/NAT networking, try switching it to Bridged Networking so that Windows gets its own IP address on the same network as the Raspberry Pi.

Then, from the RPi, first test:
ping <Windows-IP>
and then:
ssh pi@<Windows-IP> - this is assuming you have a pi user configured

If SSH works, the PicoChess remote-engine configuration should then be testable in exactly the same way as described in the manual that Andrea created.

Your x64 notebook will of course be an easier first test, because it removes the Parallels networking layer."

Hope this helps.

Andrea.

[Andrea Gatti]

Hi folks,

attached is the updated version of the instructions for remote engines and tutor.

Changes:

1) Changed the paths to avoid "spaces" and "parenthesis" in the file names, since this may not be parsed correctly by some engines

2) Added the steps to configure remote access to the endgame Tablebases for the remote engines and remote tutor.

Il giorno martedì 11 agosto 2026 alle 11:45:30 UTC+2 lvogl...@gmail.com ha scritto:

[Andrea Gatti]

@Luigi have you been able to resolve the issue and ssh to your Mac (or Windows machine)?

[Luigi Vogliobene]

No, I was not able to solve.