Author: Gordon Rattray
Date: 09:29:35 12/20/00
Some people have been giving their initial impressions of Shredder 5. I'd like to share my opinions too... The first remark I'd make about Shredder 5 is that it is a very professional chess program. Even before I started to test the engine, I was very impressed by the program. The author has obviously put a lot of effort and thought into many aspects of the software, not just it's playing strength. The GUI is one of the best I've ever used. It's supports a good deal of functionality and the display (board, analysis, etc.) is very clear and well laid out. The only minor disappointment I had was that the online help was a bit minimal. But aside from this small weakness, the GUI is quite simply fantastic. I've only had Shredder a matter of days so I cannot offer any significant test results for the engine. For the small set of tests positions that I have tried, Shredder has performed extremely well. There has been some discussion recently regarding playing strength compared to the time control. With regard to this, I'd like to say that I also find that Shredder is generally not the quickest at finding the key moves. However, it has a very high rate of getting there in the end. So, while I'm not necessarily seeing key moves being found in a matter of seconds, very few of my test positions failed to be solved within a few minutes. Initial impressions... this engine looks to be extremely strong across a wide variety of positions. Has anyone else performed an "overnight" analysis? When I checked Shredder after leaving it for 5 hours or so analysing the same position, it reported the positions per second as being -99 !! (yes a negative value). I'm still trying to figure out what this could mean... ;-) Maybe it didn't like what it seen and decided to quickly "unsee"... ;-) Overall, I'm extremely impressed with Shredder 5. Gordon
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.