Author: Albert Silver
Date: 07:08:53 11/28/99
Go up one level in this thread
On November 27, 1999 at 18:32:40, Charles Unruh wrote:
>On November 27, 1999 at 10:15:06, Robert Pawlak wrote:
>
>>I suspect some people in the group may have missed it, but the current SSDF
>>champion is going to be an analysis engine for Chess Assistant! Convekta/CA has
>>been super secrective up to this point, but it looks like they have really
>>dropped a bombshell.
>>
>>This is incredible, because people have long wanted a few more choices for
>>internal analysis than Zarkov and Crafty. So CA reaches into their hat and pulls
>>out a Tiger!
>>
>>Bob P.
>
>
>NO!!!!!! Why not just make it a chessbase, that's what i have, and most others
>as well, why not sell to the largest pool of potential buyers. Well i guess,
>they were the only ones to offer the bucks. Truth of the matter is i just hate
>having to jump to different progs to get analysis. I love being able to jump
>from f5 to j5 to h7(would say Nimzo but who uses that:)), it's so easy. Guess
>i'll just have to keep using the dos version of tiger :(
I can understand your point of view, but I can't subscribe to it. I bought CA3
when it came out, and was very impressed by it. I told a friend of mine who used
CB6 about how fast it was, and he claimed it was due to my superior hardware.
So, one weekend, he came over and we installed CB6 in order to test it. The
results in search speed when comparing the two were just unbelievable. Imagine
the famous tale of the turtle and the rabbit, and you will get a very accurate
picture. Searches in CA3 at their most complicated took 1:30 whereas the same
search on CB6 (even with the search booster) would take forever. You cannot
shrug this off. Remember that this is the primary function of a database:
organize data, and be able to find what you want. If I told you program x takes
5 minutes to find the solution but program y takes 1, which will you buy? I now
own both CB7 and CA4 and the difference is still enormous: most times a
difference in minutes not seconds. Transferring games from one database or even
subset to another was another clear CA victory. The handy sidebar a la File
Manager/Windows Explorer wiht all of the darg and drop flexibility you could
want, and the speed (again) of transferring files was huge. Of course, there is
more to it than that, which is why I bought CB7 in the first place. 4 elements
that really tilted the balance in CB's favor:
1) Better board. If you are going to spend hours and hours in front of a board,
then it has to be pleasant looking. Frankly, I didn't think (still don't) much
of it, meaning that given a choice between studying the same position in CA or
CB, I'll choose CB.
2) Engines. This also killed CA. The equivalent of trying to run in a race while
limping. CA only had Dragon (if you never heard of it, you haven't missed
anything) and Zarkov. Zarkov was solid enough but still wasn't up to the Fritz
or Hiarcs that CB was offering. True, CA allowed one to call up external
programs such as Rebel, Mchess, or others, but the time of loading and exiting
the program was terrible.
3) Better database. The core base wasn't much better (in fact Big99 or Mega99
users might want to check out the dozens of erroneously players rated over 2700
and 2800 - poor Gary), and CA did a very good job, but CB's tens of thousands of
GM commented games meant that either CA do likewise or allow one to access .cbh
files in it. In CA4 they opted for the latter. A wise decision IMO, but buggy to
say the least, and as a consequence pretty much unusable. Even plain unannotated
games would come out with problems. And fatal errors would appear if I tried to
simply convert a large .cbh database into CA's native format.
4) Multimedia. Here CB really innovated and by allowing the program to handle
.html files were able to imbed photos and even videos into textual presentation,
allowing them to produce one of the wonders of the chess world: Chessbase
Magazine. I was skeptical at first as to the advantage this offered, but after
having seen Kasparov throw up his hands in despair after losing material to
Anand, and then Anand's enthusiatic retelling of this, suddenly these players
became more than stills in a magazine and names on a rating list. It was
awesome. I also bought CB's superb Alekhine CD, somewhat nervous at seeing
everything in German as the blurb stated, but was relieved to see that the
extensive videos of Shirov, Gelfand, and King commenting on Alekhine were all in
English. The many old pictures of Alekhine and his opponents in tournaments of
yesteryear were also a great pleasure. Here, CA had nothing to offer but to be
honest, if this had been the only issue, I could easily have done without
(though not my subscription to CBM).
After listing my complaints, I was pleasantly caught off-guard by Zakharov, who
is pretty much the Godfather of CA for Windows, telling me that:
1) they had instituted some changes into the board.
2) casually mentioned Chess Tiger would be an internal engine (my jaw fell open
at this as I had pretty much given up hope that CA would ever successfully
address this).
3) better .cbh support.
As for 4) I expect at least photos to appear within the program if their new Tal
CD is any indication.
Frankly, I can hardly wait.
Albert Silver
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.