I'm currently playing at a weekend tourament, and this dude has an engine called Toby Chess that he is trying to sell to all the participants. He has it playing simultaneous matches against fritz 12 and rybka 3, and it seems to be winning 70% of the games and drawing the rest?!
If this engine is so strong, why hasn't anyone heard of it? My first thought was that it was great at playing engines, but could'nt play against people. Who knows?
The guy kept telling me that by buying his engine, I could get my rating from about 1600 to 2200 in 6 months, because "it will teach me instantly recognise tactics and checkmates like they were second nature."
I'm pretty sure we can all agree that such a leap is pretty much impossible, but what do you think about this engine?
I'm guessing it's most likely reverse-engineered to exploit the specific way fritz & rybka prune their search tree, giving great results against them and much worse in a general situation. there was a thread about toby a few months ago, and as I remember the 'reasons' for it strengths seemed a bit unfeasible in a computational sense. not to mention that the guy's page for it looked almost like a viagra advert.
it's all just my personal speculation though, I have no hands-on experience with toby. but one thing I can say for sure: even if it could back up the extraordinary claims, getting to 2200 in 6 months with toby or any other engine is clear evidence of the whole thing being a scam.
If I were curious about the program, I'd probably go to the Talkchess forum ( http://talkchess.com/forum/index.php ) and do a search for the terms "Toby chess" and/or "Toby Tal" in the "General Topics" forum.
I don't know if you could reach any definitive conclusion, but you'd get numerous opinions.