Junior 6 is a recent offering from Chessbase. Both the stand-alone Junior 6 playing program, and the Chessbase-compatible Junior chess engine are included when you purchase Junior. So you can use the program by itself, or in conjunction with other Chessbase offerings.
The stand-alone Junior program uses the Fritz 6 user interface, so all the things I've said about Fritz apply equally to Junior as well. Those of you that are unfamiliar with Fritz should go read my review here. While the programs are very similar in appearance, there are two differences that you may wish to consider when making a purchasing decision. One is the difference in playing style, of which I will not say too much (you can find some sample games at Tony Hedlund's Site). The second is how playing style is modified with the personalities dialog box. Junior has a very slight edge here in that personality parameters are shown in terms that a typical chess player would understand, rather than in computerese. For example, you can control things like king safety, control of the center, development, favor sacrifices, etc. This is probably a minor difference for many people, and the decision really comes down to the difference in playing style. Certain engines excel at playing certain kinds of positions, so one engine may see something that the other does not. So this is probably where Junior is most useful - as a second opinion when looking over games you wish to analyze.
There is also another version of Junior 6 that people with multiple CPUs may be interested in purchasing. It is called 'Deep Junior', and is designed to run on dual-CPU systems (but currently not more than that). Deep Junior can also be run on single processor systems as well, but more slowly than the single processor version. Note that you will need to be running Windows NT or Windows 2000 if you want to make use of the dual CPUs. Theoretically, with this kind of setup, you will get at most a 2X speedup of chess engine calculations. But practically speaking, you can expect the improvement to be a little less than this.
Copy Protection
Must be installed from CD. The CD is checked when engines are run for the first time.
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