Author: John Coffey
Date: 09:55:49 03/03/00
Fritz 5 used to crash when I would build a large opening index. Well I was able to build an opening key with Fritz 6 last night. I would like to get a larger database (than 300K games) at some point. I have the Essentia/ultimate DB stuff that I can use. After playing around with Fritz 6 I was at first thinking that I didn't like it as much as Fritz 5. I had several complaints but upon further reflection I am not complaining as much. My complaints mostly had to do with look/feel and levels of difficulty ..... 1. The board was smaller. I have since learned how to resize the board. 2. The look of the board on Fritz 5 was "cooler." This is really important to me. I don't know how it is for other people, but for my heavily myopic eyes I found the simple two color pieces on Fritz5 to be much more pleasing. On Fritz 6 the pieces are multicolored, which I think makes them harder to differentiate. They should have at least given us the option of using the old pieces. Even the "cool" color scheme on Fritz 6 is not as much to my liking as the Fritz 5 color scheme. The colors are brighter which for me doesn't work as well. 3. Originally I thought the menus on Fritz 5 were less than intuitive. But I got used to them. Now I have the same complaints about the Fritz 6 menus which are considerably different. 4. These guys do not understand what the average user is looking for in a chess opponent. Granted not everybody buys a chess program to play with, but a great many people do. The trouble with both Chessmaster and Fritz is they limit the program's ability by introducing artificial stupidity. This means that occasionally they make a randomly dumb move. I don't feel particularly good about a game where I am being outplayed by the computer then all of a sudden the program hangs a piece. This means that the computer is going to play better than me on most moves and then do something really foolish. If the computer is going to play weaker then it should be more consistent. Friend Mode is the best way to limit the ability of Fritz, but it suffers from the artificial stupidity problem. You can select fixed time, but 1 second a move is at least 2000 tournament strength which is too strong for most players. When I selected rated game the lowest rating it would give me is about 1680 which actually appears to play much stronger at speed chess. COULD WE PLEASE HAVE RATINGS THAT GO LOWER? How about all the way to 0? The best scenario is to limit how much the computer looks at. The "fixed depth" almost accomplishes this, but I thought that 1 ply was about class D and that 2 ply jumps up about 400 points. Another problem with "fixed depth" is that if you survive the middle game you will crush it in the endgame. Instead it would be better to have a method by which you can limit the number of positions on average the computer looks at. An ideal chess program would have levels where .... level 1 looks at 32 positions. level 2 looks at 64 positions level 3 looks at 128 positions. level 4 looks at 256 positions. etc. regardless of how much time the human takes. I miss the old days when dedicated chess computers actually did this! I found it very instructive to beat a level and then challenge myself to beat the next level up! 5. The copy protection was annoying when I tried to make a backup copy. I understand their need to protect themselves. In conclusion Fritz 6 is very much like Fritz 5. I would like to have seen more new features, although I tested the engine and found it could solve one position better than Fritz 5. John Coffey
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