Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 21:27:22 09/21/03
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On September 21, 2003 at 22:07:24, Bob Riley wrote: >Hi, > >I see that Chess Academy has a budget-priced DB and tutorial called "Goliath >Blitz." Has anyone used it? How good is it as a tutorial program. My rating >is only about 1100-1200 BTW. > >Thanks for any feedback. > >Bob Riley Goliath Blitz is the commercial version of Little Goliath, which can be obtained for free. Little Goliath is approximately equal in playing strength to Crafty and Aristarch, and I would imagine that the commercial version would be stronger (maybe a little, or maybe a lot). From the SSDF, Goliath Light (yet another version of the program) appears to be about equal with some versions of Gandalf and Nimzo (both commercial programs). Personally, I don't have a whole lot of money to spend on chess engines, so I am little more picky about what I buy. There are lots of strong engines out there. I prefer to buy the ones that offer something special and different, such as responsive customer support, versions that work in multiple interfaces (ex. UCI versions), versions that work on multiple operating systems, and so on. So when I make my purchase of new chess engines soon, I'll probably be buying Shredder, which comes with a UCI version, and Deep Sjeng, which supports just about any interface or OS you could want. Sjeng, being a Lokasoft engine, comes with the ChessPartner interface, which looks like a very nice product in itself. If I had more money to spend I'd probably get Rebel 12, which supports the Winboard protocol, and then maybe ChessMaster, which also supports Winboard. Basically I really appreciate it a great deal when someone doesn't lock me into one interface. It takes no more than one afternoon to implement UCI. I'm amazed more commercial engines don't come with Winboard or UCI support. It's such a small thing to implement that means so much to a lot of computer chess hobbyists.
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