I recently received a pre-release version of Chess Academy 2000, the latest offering from Intellinvest. This new version represents a significant upgrade from the previous one. While most of the tutorial modules remain, the database portion of the program has some new features and functionality. There is also a new chess playing engine incorporated, along with support for Winboard engines. Additionally, the size of the included database has been increased (to 1.6 million games), and has had duplicate games removed from it.
I looked at the complete Chess Academy 2000 system, containing all the tutorial modules (23 of them). Various configurations of the program are available, the principal difference among them being the number and types of tutorial modules that are included. Prospective purchasers of this software should check the Chess Academy Website to determine the combination of modules that best suits their needs.
With this latest release, Chess Academy wants to be your one program that can be used for any chess task you might have – i.e. play a game, conduct database analysis, or do some training with the many training modules. This review will now examine how well the program does in each of these areas. However, I still believe that Chess Academy’s strongest area is its tutorials.
While it is true that version 99 of the program was rock-solid, the current version 2000 is reasonably robust, but I did experience some crashes when using the program under windows NT V4. I have since been informed by the manufacturer that these bugs have been isolated and fixed. Most of the problems I found were reproducible, so I expect that coding errors were fairly easy to track down.
Tutorial
In terms of tutorials, there are no new modules available. For those that have not read my previous review of Chess Academy 99, I have included many of my observations from that review in this section. While the tutorials remain largely unchanged, you can now use a chess engine to double-check your own analysis. This is a welcome feature, especially for some of the more complex exercises.
What follows is a list of the topics covered by the tutorials:
1200 Middle game test positions on the following topics: Exchange Sacrifice, Isolated Pawn, Hanging Pawns, Compensation for the Queen, The Bishop Pair, Rook vs Minor Pieces. There is a significant amount of text and variations accompanying most of the examples.
3,500 Middle game combinations, which are a superset of the Informant combinations book. Variations and main lines are included. While I was unable to verify that the program contains all the positions from the Informant book, my overall feeling is that the test positions in the program are not as difficult as those in the Informant publication. For instance, I think that the problems are most suited to those below the master level.
10,000 Endgame studies. Variations and main lines are included.
10,000+ Annotated endings, organized by material. Variations and main lines are included.
In these modules, the user is presented with a position or game fragment. He or she then has to select the proper move when prompted by the program. Alternate plausible lines of play are also presented in some examples. When these variations are presented, the user has the option of using another board to go over them. This board is then dismissed when the user is ready to go on to the next example. Hints are available also, and can be in the form of the piece to move, and/or square to move to. Bonus points are awarded for quick solutions, and you have a fixed amount of user-definable time to complete the exercises. Finally, there is also an extra "scratch board" that you can use for testing your own variations.
Tutorial Strengths
- Exercises are timed, with bonus points awarded for quick answers. There is nothing like the ticking of a clock to accelerate your thought processes.
- All timing parameters are settable for the tutorials (move speed, amount of time spent paused for reader to review annotations, time allowed for user to solve exercise)
- A nice analysis board pops-up when needed. There are really two types, one can be used for your own variations, while the other can be used for variations presented in the exercise.
- A number of the modules contain a significant amount of text explanation.
- Support for many different languages, including English, German, Russian, French, Italian, and Spanish.
- The program is user-extendable – you can add your own exercises.
- This is one of the few tutorial programs that allows you to print examples. This is very nice if you want to review something later, and you do not have your PC. Additionally, diagrams are embedded in the tutorial examples. The only caveat is that the diagrams do not indicate the side to move.
- The program now remembers the last exercise you did in a particular set of tutorials – this is a welcome improvement.
- A chess engine is now available to play out positions that you might be having trouble with. You can thus use it to double-check your own analysis.
Tutorial Weaknesses
- There are no detailed statistics on success by theme, etc. for tutorial exercises.
- I would have liked to see an indication of the side to move that is a little larger and/or easier to see.
- Multiple users are not supported. By this I mean that results are not tracked for multiple users.
- A reader of this page pointed out that you do not get complete game scores for the training examples. You may be able to find a game score in the included database (it is easy to do), but not every game mentioned in the training modules is present in the database.
Database
There are some significant improvements in the database from the 99 version. First, the quality of the game collection has improved. There has also been a slight increase in the total number of games. On the surface the total number of games appears to have changed little, but a number of duplicates were removed, so I think the change is more significant than it might appear at first glance.
The key functions have also been improved to the point where they are now quite usable (note: keys are a term used to describe a fast way of accessing and indexing chess games in the database). Keys are organized into a hierarchy, with proper names for the various key categories, along with a graphical picture of each key. The upshot of all this is that the keys are now very easy to use. In fact in this area, I think that Chess Academy has an implementation that is superior to all the other database programs. If you find yourself doing a lot of complex searches, then you will find the large number of predefined keys to be very helpful (for example, there are keys for many different pawn structures, opening systems, endgames, and sacrifices).
The implementation of the engine interface is not as seamless as it is with many other database programs. For instance, you cannot automatically incorporate engine analysis into a game. This is both a blessing and a curse. For one thing, it forces you to reproduce, and possibly think about the analysis presented by the engine, but it is slower. Perhaps more significant is that you are not able to automatically analyze or blunder check games with the engine. I have been informed by Intellinvest that the ability to incorporate engine analysis into the game score will be added in the future.
The chess tree remains unchanged from version 99. You can see success statistics and navigate through the tree, but there are no advanced functions (like commenting of tree positions or searches for unplayed transpositions).
As in other database programs, you can do searches on position, material, piece maneuvers, header (things like name, tournament, date, opening), etc. There is a delete duplicates feature in the database, and there are a number of tools available for copying games between databases, although there is no drag and drop support for copying games or variations. There is support also for variations and multimedia commentary within game scores.
Routine header searches are very fast – this means if you are studying a game you found in a book, you will quickly be able to locate it. A very fast indexing system, similar to that used in Chess Assistant, is used to speed up certain kids of searches, and increase the probability that you will find what you are looking for.
Database Strengths
- A very nice system for searching by opening name – you can input an English name for the variation you want, and the program automatically selects the proper ECO codes for you. You can also input the ECO codes directly if you want.
- Databases are indexed to speed up certain kinds of searches. The other competing databases do this to a certain extent, but both Chess Assistant and Chess Academy have the fastest implementations. Because of this indexing, header searches are fast.
- A full set of button bars for the most-used functions. They can be enabled or disabled at will.
- The program is very fast in all searches.
- A chess tree function is included for studying openings.
- There is a doubles deletion function for finding duplicate games
- There are library management facilities for managing alternate spellings of player name, tournaments, etc. This is an important tool for managing large databases.
- A very large 1.6 Million game database is included
- Import of Chessbase CBF, PGN and Chess Academy 3 format are all supported.
- If you like 3-D boards, this is the first database program I have reviewed to support this feature. You can control placement, but not lighting.
- Multiple 2-D and 3-D boards are included (3 different 2-D and 20+ different 3-D), with customizable board sizes and colors.
- There are a number of pre-defined database ‘keys’ provided with the program. These keys define a number of typical themes (in plain English), so that you can access information with that particular positional feature very easily. For example, there are preexisting themes for isolated pawns, and the bishop sacrifice on h7.
- There are a couple of very nice training functions included in the program. The first is called ‘restore move’, when this feature is activated, the next game move is hidden from you, so that you can try to guess it yourself. This mode is very useful for both studying games, and practicing openings. The other function is called ‘restore position’, which is unique among all the database programs. In this mode, the current board position is cleared, and you then have to restore it. Various timing and hint options are available – the mode is primarily meant to help the user play blindfold chess, and to improve visualization skills.
- True-type fonts are included for chess diagrams and notation, and you can export game scores and diagrams to RTF format files. Printed output is very nice, and print options are easy to understand.
- Multimedia is supported; you can add both video and audio comments to games. Note that you need to create these files with external programs.
- You can combine different types of searches (like header+material for instance). This is sometimes nice to do; for instance you may want to check Rubinstein’s technique in R+P endgames.
- You can now analyze EPD files, but there is no way to import analysis back into a game for instance.
- There is any easy to use export to HTML function.
- I like the display of dataset statistics. It is very straightforward and easy to understand. For instance, you can see who played the most games, which openings were most prevalent, game length, etc. There is a graphical representation of the scoring percentages, but it cannot be used to show a histogram of game length. This information is available in non-graphical format though.
- You can now add game fragments and positions to a database. This was not possible in the 99 version.
Database Weaknesses
- You cannot search through multiple databases at once.
- No drag-and-drop of analysis is supported.
- No drag-and-drop copying of games is supported. There is a clipboard however, so you can do cut and paste type operations on your data.
- There is not any way to reorder variations once they are in the game. However, you can contorl which variation is shown first, when stepping through the game score (i.e. main variation or first alternative).
- You can’t search by player ELO (a player’s ELO is also not stored in the database).
- There is no automatic way to get engine analysis into a game score.
- The approach used for creating HTML files requires that viewers of a web page have the Chess Academy font installed on their machines (probably not a good assumption to make). While the pages load faster when using the font implementation, it is not as compatible as an image-based approach (which is under development for the next version).
- Position setup for searches could be easier. For instance, when you are setting up a board position, it should be possible to just move the pieces with the mouse, but the program does not allow it. Of course, you also need the ability to add/subtract pieces from the board (which seems to be the default mode of operation). But overall, this slower than being able to move pieces on the board.
Playing Program
The new playing program represents the most significant addition to Chess Academy. Some of the key features of this playing program include opening books, middlegame books and endgame tablebases. The middlegame book is a new feature for playing programs. The details of this feature are a little hazy, and I’m sure that the authors of the chess engine probably want to keep it that way. Suffice it to say that it is another way of encoding chess knowledge into the engine.
While you cannot edit the middlegame book, you can edit the opening book. The editor is quite easy to use, with a display of the board available at all times. You can adjust how often the program will play a particular set of moves very easily. You can even create opening books from datasets (which can be any subset of a database).
The engine can be handicapped using a variety of playing settings. You can even modify piece weights if you so desire. There is also a tactical handicapping mode (like Fritz’s sparring). In this mode, the computer will purposefully overlook some tactical shots (and hopefully you will find them). I think that even some weaker players should be able to get a decent game out of the engine.
You can also use a wide variety of Winboard engines in Chess Academy. You can see the list of supported engines below (in the Strengths section), but there are about 30. Configuration files are included, so all you need is to download the proper engine, and put it in the proper file folder.
Perhaps the biggest limitation I found in the pre-release version was the lack of any indication of when a time control is reached. The clock only counts upward, and the computer will not even call the user’s flag if he/she oversteps the time limits for a game. Note: I have been informed that the final release of the program does call the user’s flag.
Overall, the playing capabilities are fairly basic. But it is a significant new capability for Chess Academy.
Playing Program Strengths
- There is opening book support, with an adjustable book depth. This is useful if you want to handicap the program.
- Many winboard engines are supported, including: anmon, ant, arasan, bionic, cilian, comet, crafty, exchess, faile, fortress, gnuchess, inmich, lambchop, ldb, lggold, mfchess, monik, phalanx, pierre, skaki, ssechess, tcb, tristram, and zchess.
- If you have Ken Thompson’s Endgame CDs, the engine can easily use them. They are not included with the Chess Academy package, but they can be purchased separately (for instance, you can get them with Shredder).
- The tree editor is pretty easy to use, and has a clear, easy to understand dialog box. Generally speaking, book creation is quite easy.
- There is an interface for an RS-232 autoplayer. This is not something that I normally fool with, so I can’t comment on how well it works.
- There are a number playing levels that you can select from (six in all, plus a custom setting that allows for saving user modifications).
- The program has a good choice of available time controls, including tournament, blitz, moves/time, time/move, time/game, equal time, hourglass, Fisher and fixed depth.
- You can pick separate time controls for the computer and player.
- You can modify engine parameters like piece values, pawn structures and mobilty.
- You can pause a game, and ask for hints.
Playing Program Weaknesses
- There needs to be some way to save all the engine settings so that you can quickly and easily switch between predefined sets of engines and engine options
- As far as I could tell, there is no indication of when a user’s time is up (or when any time control is reached).
- The clock always counts up, so it is difficult to judge how much time is left for the game.
- There is no audio indication that the computer has made it’s move. This can be a factor if you are playing the game on a real board.
- The only way to conduct engine vs. engine tournaments is via the autoplayer.
- I found that having to always go into the engine options dialog to change engine settings was somewhat slow, there needs to be a faster/easier way to change engine settings.
- There is no support for variations in the game score.
- If you make an illegal move in serious mode, you can not make any subsequent moves in the game.
- The clock display needs to be larger.
Copy Protection:
Unlimited installs of the 1.6 million game database. Certain tutorial
modules and the main program have a limit of 20 installations with master floppy.
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