Fat Fritz Followup

Near the end of last year, on an off-Monday between my fortnightly TCEC/CCC posts, I ran a short piece about 'Fat Fritz' by Albert Silver (November 2019). By coincidence I referenced it the following Monday in TCEC/CCC Bonus Events (ditto):-

After CCC11 R2, the CCC ran two matches [Stockfish, Lc0 vs. Fat Fritz]. While the results aren't particularly encouraging for Fat Fritz...

Since that time, Chessbase has continued to improve and promote the product. As the only commercial AI/NN chess engine on the market, it's worthwhile to follow its progress, so here are a series of Chessbase.com posts from the same period:-

• 2019-11-28: Fat Fritz in the cloud (Albert Silver) • 'Have you just spent a tidy sum for graphics cards and even a powerful new computer? Well, there is an elegant way to make the hardware pay for itself. Instead of switching off the computer half the time (or more) you can make it available to other users in the ChessBase Engine Cloud. They will pay you for the privilege.'
  
  
• 2020-01-09: Fat Fritz for the club player (Tanmay Srinath) • 'How does an ordinary club player or an ambitious lower-rated amateur makes use of this [NN] technology to improve?'
  
  
• 2020-03-05: Fat Fritz 1.1 update and a small gift (Albert Silver) • 'As promised in the announcement of the release of Fat Fritz, the first update to the neural network [NN] has been released, stronger and more mature, and with it comes the brand new smaller and faster Fat Fritz for CPU [NN] which will produce quality play even on a pure CPU setup.'
  
  
• 2020-03-27: Fat Fritz: strong, creative, original (Stephan Oliver Platz) • 'The Fat Fritz engine of the Fritz 17 program is currently number 1 on the CCRL ELO list and has a positive score against all tested programs.'
  
  
• 2020-06-14: Running Leela and Fat Fritz on your notebook (WIM Evelyn Zhu; 15 Comments) • 'In order to unleash the full power of the NN algorithms, we must use some kind of GPU accelerator device. The problem is that a compact laptop often can’t sustain the running NN engines and will crash. Here is a super elegant solution to this problem!'

A few notes to the above -- 'The CCRL ELO list' can be found at CCRL Blitz - Index. Fat Fritz is currently at no.2 behind Lc0, but ahead of no.3 Leelenstein (NB: also color-coded 'commercial' by CCRL). • The last Chessbase.com post is the only article that attracted comments, meaning the topic hit a nerve with the engine community.

For some reason, Fat Fritz doesn't compete in the TCEC or CCC competitions. Leelenstein does compete and is consistently one of the top engines.