Are there any 'romantic' chess programs?

Question

Are there any chess programs, which play gambits? I have two solutions in mind:

1. It tries to offer situations where one of your moves looks quite promising on the short term (3-5 moves), but later it turns out to be disastrous.

Or the opposite:

2. It tries to reach positions, which look bad for you, but there's a single line (hard to find), which can save the day.

I guess the difficulty of writing such programs can be that it's not trivial to decide which lines are easy to be found by a human and which aren't. (And that also depends on the skills of the player, so some parameters would be required.)

Answer 1

Houdini may be worthwhile checking out. See link.

http://www.cruxis.com/chess/houdini.htm (4th paragraph down)

"The Chess Club Live Facebook page phrased it like this: "If there ever was a computer descendant of the romantic players like Morphy, Anderssen, Spielmann, Marshall, Bogoljubow, Tal, Nezhmetdinov, Shirov, Morozevich it would be Houdini. Houdini is the current World number 1 chess engine and plays in a very romantic style."

I didn't notice when the quote was from because the last time in the TCEC Championship that Houdini was #1 was 2013.

I use Houdini 5. I can attest to the romantic style of play. Quite a change when you are used to seeing how Komodo or Stockfish play. Settings are relatively user friendly.

It is a commercial engine but the developers do offer Houdini 1.5 for free.

Answer 2

Stockfish, among several others (e.g. Fritz), has an aggressiveness parameter; you'll want to look in the 'Play Style' setting, or words to that effect, in the UCI.

A more aggressive engine has a higher propensity to make potentially unsound material sacrifices; it translates to positions where accurate play leads to an advantage, though assessing the ease of finding the refutation is beyond me.