Author: Enrique Irazoqui
Date: 11:03:42 11/03/98
An afternoon with Hiarcs 7 beta gave me a few first impressions. There are some interface improvements, like keyboard shortcuts, showing NPS (about 10 times less than Fritz 5) and hashtables usage, and a few more refinements here and there, but most of the work went to the engine. It seems quicker and knows more. It feels quite a bit stronger and preserves the active, "common sense", natural kind of playing characteristic of Hiarcs. So far, I am quite impressed by what I see, including 2 victories in the first 2 games it played (40/40 on 2 PII-400), with very fine endgame playing. Mark didn’t waste the last 2 years. He claims an improvement of about 60 Elo points, and for what I have seen so far it might be true. For the bad news, Hiarcs 7 is still a 16 bit DOS program that has to be loaded from DOS (no himem.sys) if you want to give it the maximum hashtables (63 MB). Under Windows it gets 128 K. Same looks of H6, which means clear and comfortable, but nothing to write home about. Like Hiarcs 6, it seems to be rock stable. But the engine... I have always been a fan of Hiarcs, and this one seems to be the best of all. Enrique
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