Author: Alex Shalamanov
Date: 00:06:13 09/08/05
There's been a lot of contradicting views about what a programme's GUI and a chess engine should be to arouse commercial success with the public. Since correspondence players are likely to be the major customers of chess playing programmes compared to the other groups (OTB GM, IM or FM as well as chess amateurs, children, etc.), I'm going to state what CC players seek finding in chess programmes. 1. A strong analytic tool as a chess engine capable of sound positional evaluation and making good long-term middlegame and endgame plans as well as sophisticated embedded endgame knowledge. 2. A triple brain feature like one used under Shredder Classic GUI when two or more chess engines work in parallel and the third engine compares the output produced and chooses the most optimal. However, the engines should be super strong but have a different style and evaluation approach like, say, Shredder 9 and Fruit 2.1 or Spike 1.0. 3. A huge commented or plain text game database to be replenished regularly. 4. A good tool for commenting one's finished games with extended text comments as in Fritz versions. 5. A good and convenient-looking 2D chess set. As a rule, correspondence players are very pessimistic about 3D chess sets because they use programmes mostly to analyse positions and the 2D format would be most approprate for analysis purposes. 6. A tool for generating email chess messages or a webchess tool integrated like in ECTool, because correspondence players participate in various email or webchess tournaments apart from regular snailmail chess tournaments. 7. A playchess server connection to play online chess, because many CC players are also strong OTB players and like blitz games for pleasure. It's understandable that it's not an easy job to take all this into account in developing a single software product; however, the first 5 are ones to be of utter importance for CC players. And, please, don't kick me, those were just my personal requirements for the chess programme, so take them as just one personal subjective demands as an ordinary ICCF member. Uri Blass or other strong CC players would obviously have a different view about them. Regards, Alex
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