Author: Shaley
Date: 22:40:24 08/28/05
As a long-standing OTB and CC player I've certainly used very different chess engines to analyse my games. Some of them are more tactical like Junior 8, Shredder 9, Rebel 12, Chess Tiger 2004 etc. They are very good in open and acute positions when the tactics is on the agenda. Others like Ruffian 2.1.0 or Fritz 8 are excellent in positional games and endgames. But as it happens only Hiarcs 9 combines wild attacking and speculative play with extremely high endgame technique. In other words, it's a more universal player than others. It's a real pleasure to use it for position and game analysis. Earlier Hiarcs versions were attackers too, but they had some drawbacks in positional games; they offset errors in positional play with the tactical tricks. Hiarcs 9 was something different in style and play approach. A great many chess players I talked to were fascinated by Hiarcs 9; they only mentioned one clear drawback: its slow speedsearch. When you have to comment on a series of games it really takes a while, so they preferred using Fritz 8 for it. I think we can say Hiarcs 9 play is very alike Alekhine's style; that's how he played sacrificing material for the initiative setting hard tasks before his challengers and having extraordinary endgame technique. As to the new engines, I feel Fruit 2.1 more as Capablanca or Tigran Petrosyan; it's very cautious and a purely positional engine. As to Zappa is concerned, I haven't learnt it as yet. It played very sound games at Reikjavik WCCC but will the new commercial version be as good on a Pentium-based SPM as it was on an AMD MPM at the championship is still a question without a reasonable answer.
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