Author: Steve Maughan
Date: 03:37:56 08/30/01
Just received Pocket Fritz today. Unfortunately it didn't load correctly on my machine (Compaq iPAQ 64 Mb). I think the problem lies with Windows 2000 with which I was syncing. Anyway I managed to get it running by transferring the CAB file and decompressing manually. The board looks great. There are several viewing options - I liked the simple pieces and marble board. This gives a clear view. There is also a nice analysis view where you can see the usual search data. As I have said many times before on this forum, Palm / Pocket PCs are just *THE* *BEST* way to play chess. And Pocket Fritz is no exception. It is really easy to use. Setting up comparison positions on desktop Shredder seemed positively cumbersome when compared to it's pint sized counterpart! My first real surprise was the nodes per second which varied from 5k in the middle game to 15k in a pawn and king endgame. Most of the middle game it is at ~6k. This is quite a bit slower than I expected. Genius searches >30k on my iPAQ and speaking with Christophe he is hoping for more than 10k with Tiger. Shredder on my desktop does 350k so adjusting for speed this would equate to Pocket Fritz being approximately 380 ELO below it's desktop brother (ln(350/8)/ln(2)*70). This would give an ELO of ~2250 based on Eric Hallsworths Selective Search rating list. I suspect that Genius is not too far off this so it will be interesting to see if anyone can play some games against the two. Running a few simple tests also indicated that the engine is different compared to Shredder 5. I think I saw somewhere that Stefan had tweaked it for anti-human play. Is it based on Shredder 5, 5.32 or 6? Anyone know? In comparison to Genius, which for now is the only serious competitor to Fritz for the Pocket PC, they are just 'different'. I prefer the board views and analysis features of Fritz but Genius has an interesting playing style. In addition Genius only takes up about 111k compared to over 1 Mb for Fritz (336k for the opening book - which is a good sign). For the price I would have thought that they are both a 'must have' for anyone who has a Pocket PC and an interest in computer Chess. All in all - fantastic - five stars to Stefan and Chessbase! Steve Maughan
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.