Author: Jorge Pichard
Date: 17:46:08 03/12/05
"People are always asking me to characterize the playing styles of various chess engines. That's easy with some of them: Shredder (see below) plays pretty solidly, almost defensively, Hiarcs plays a bit less defensively but nonetheless gives a human-like game, Tiger plays extremely tactically. But Junior's always been something of a cypher. I call its play "erratic", not because it's bad, but because you're never quite sure what you're going to see from it. One game it'll aggressively try to tear your head off, the next game it'll play more defensively, the game after that it'll play some tactic (maybe even an unsound one) to blow a position wide open. Junior is full of surprises -- and that's exactly why some players swear by it, while others just swear at it. Consequently (in my opinion), Junior's the most fun ChessBase engine to play against. I'm not sure that I 100% trust its post-game analysis (that's why I always have Fritz, Shredder, and Junior analyze my games, with Junior casting the "swing vote") but I do truly love to play against it. So it's always great to see a new version of Junior hit my mailbox. The centerpiece of Junior9 is, of course, the Junior9 engine itself which (as always) has been tweaked up quite a bit since the last version. The GUI is the now-familiar ChessProgram8, which is the same user interface as in Fritz8 and the other latest ChessBase engine versions. The advantage here should be obvious: you don't need to learn a whole new interface just because you bought a new chess program; you already know the commands. This is the latest version of the GUI, too (e.g. it contains Chess Media System support as one of its features."
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