BishopBerkeley: According to the Spike homepage (at which the Spike engine can be downloaded for free):"Spike is the first Computerchess World Champion in Chess960 [aka FischerRandom Chess]!"
Spike homepage:
http://spike.lazypics.de/index_en.h...
Account of the Chess960 victory in Mainz (Aug 2005):
http://spike.lazypics.de/mainz2005_...
Download site for the different version of the Spike UCI engine (which you should be able to run in Shredder (Computer) , Fritz (Computer) (or any of the Chessbase interfaces), Chessmaster (Computer) , or Winboard. Simply see your program's "Help" listing for 'UCI engines');("Version 1.0a Mainz" of Spike was used in the Chess960 contest):
http://spike.lazypics.de/dl_index_e...
And clearly judging from the results above, Spike can hold its own in traditional Chess against many of the strongest engines!
Incidentally, here is our own Fischerandom Chess Generator .
Please also feel free to peruse my own curious Chess site, with many links on Computer Chess and many other Chess topics (simply scroll down in the rightmost column and start clicking!):
http://www.bbbbbb.org/
Incidentally, in the Charlie Brown / Peanuts comics, "Spike" was the name of "the loner brother of Snoopy that lives out in the desert near Needles, California."
http://home.att.net/~its.spike/spike/
Actually, the dog upon which the Snoopy character was based was Charles M. Schulz's childhood/family pet named "Spike":
http://schulzmuseum.org/timeline.html
(: ♗ Bishop Berkeley ♗ :)