This
software package, distributed by Millenium HCC in Germany, is a collection of several chess
playing programs and engines. On the six CDROMs in this package you will find
the following chess engines and GUIs: Shredder 5 (GUI+engine), Shredder 4
(GUI+engine), and Shredder 3 (engine), Nimzo 2000A and Nimzo 2000B (engines),
SoS (engine), and Nimzo 2000 (GUI + engine), and Shredder 3,4 MCS engines. You
also get Nalimov 4 (all) and 5 (some) piece endgames on four of the five CDs.
All the engines on the CD can access the tablebase data. Furthermore, a dual
CPU version of Shredder was recently released - it is being distributed free of
charge to existing owners of the program.
That
last paragraph was certainly a mouthful. It's clear that this collection from
Millenium follows a similar trend that other software manufacturers are
following too. That is, you get the previous versions of the software, along
with the latest and greatest version. Although this is a large collection, this
review will concentrate almost exclusively on Shredder 5. And while the very
clear and efficient Nimzo 2000 GUI is included, it simply has not kept up with
times, and there is no question in my mind that most people that buy this
package will just stick with Shredder 5 (especially since the Nimzo 2000
engines will run in it).
And
before I forget to mention it, Shredder has had numerous victories in
international computer vs. computer competitions (including the World
Microcomputer Championship in 1996, 1999 and 2000). It has also been extremely
consistent in it's performance at international tournaments; and has been
undefeated for the last 33 games it has played. So there is no question that this
engine is strong.
Quick Overview of Shredder 5
The
Shredder 5 GUI has changed somewhat from its previous incarnations. For
instance, there is now a histogram showing game progress, better opening book
controls, some new audio, and of course, support for multiple engines and
analysis windows. Existing users of Shredder will not get lost though, since
the GUI retains many of it's predecessor's characteristics. For instance,
Shredders' GUI has always been very clearly and logically laid out, and the new
version continues in this tradition. Stability has never been an issue with
Shredder, and I cannot recall an instance where Shredder crashed.
Most
playing programs today included both playing and database features. Shredder
supports all the basic playing features that one would expect. For instance
there are a wide variety of time controls (Fisher, Tournament, Average
time/move, Fixed time/move and Sudden Death). There is audio announcement of
moves via your PC sound card (handy when using a real board), and there are a
variety of PC sets - a clear 2-D set, and several reasonable looking 3-D sets
as well. Shredder also has decent 3-D controls, unlike Chessmaster. There are
VCR controls for stepping through games, and functions for automated and manual
game analysis. So all the basics are present. The only thing that I really
missed was the ability to pause a game in progress.
You
can employ a number of Shredder engines with modified personalities, or create
your own. You can also use Winboard engines as well, but you might have to do
some modifications of initialization files, since Shredder does not insulate
the user from this task too much. One special feature that Shredder has is the
"triple brain", in which you can employ two engines at once, with a
referee for play or analysis. I'll have more on the triple brain, and
Shredder's playing style later in this article.
Shredder's
opening book support is very comprehensive. Not only can Shredder create books
from game collections (or manually), but it can also import books in Rebel,
Fritz and Genius formats. Overall, the opening book controls are some of the
best I have seen on a playing program. In fact, the presentation of book
options is easier to understand than in most other programs I have used. The
only negative thing that I found was that construction of opening books from
game collections is a bit on the slow side. But this is something that is done
fairly infrequently.
Shredder
includes some rudimentary database features as well. You can do header searches
(i.e.. look for a game by specific players, at certain dates), but you cannot
do more than that. So there are no position or material searches. Shredder 5
can read and write both cbf and PGN format files, so exchanging data with other
software is not a problem. Here's a power-user tip for those that get this
program: You will probably notice that the default search is via a substring
match. So if you search for games by Tal, you'll also get games where the first
player's name is Vitaly. The way around this is to place a comma after the last
name. For instance, instead of searching for "Tal", you would search
for "Tal,".
There
are other extras in the program, including support for test set processing,
auto-232, and engine vs. engine tournaments. Test suite processing seems to be
very well handled, with a nice progress display of number of positions
completed, along with number correct. You can also dump the results to a file,
so that you can look at it later. A good deal of detailed information is provided
in the file for analysis purposes.
While
Shredder 5 comes with a number of personalities for Shredder, the ones I have
tried still play extremely strong chess. So there needs to be a way to decrease
the playing strength of this program. Something similar to ELO handicapping,
and/or Fritz's sparring feature would be nice. The existing handicap levels
that are available in Shredder 5 are not timed. So I think the best bet for
handicapping play is to employ one of the weaker winboard engines. However, if
you want to modify hash settings on the winboard engines, you'll need to do so
directly, with some modification of command line or initialization parameters.
Similar to ChessMaster, Shredder does give you the option of passing a command
line to winboard engines.
If
I could, there is one thing that I would change, and that is the way the engine
score is presented to the user. This is something that is properly called an
annoyance rather than a bug. Shredder, when analyzing a game, will write the
score of a move from the standpoint of the side that currently has the move.
For instance, if it is black to move, and black has a better position, then
Shredder gives a positive score. However, this is in contrast to most other
commercial engines (Rebel, Tiger, Fritz, Nimzo, Junior, etc), which give the
score of the current position in absolute terms (i.e. a positive score always
means that white has an advantage). The convention of always using + for a
white advantage is also intuitively obvious to the average chess player.
Ok,
that's about it for the general Summary.
Playing Style, and the Invasion of the Triple Brain
What
did I notice about the playing style of Shredder, and how is it different from
some of the other strong engines out there? Well, I used Chess Assistant 6 in
multiple engine mode to compare the analysis of Tiger 13 and Shredder 5. They
are quite different in many circumstances, and tend to complement each other
nicely. The other thing that I noticed was a Shredder's willingness to sac a
pawn in order to create doubled isolated pawns in the opponent's position. This
is something that I noticed also in Shredder 3, and I consider this to be a
trademark of Shredder's play.
You
can think of the triple brain as a referee that picks the "best" move
when you have two different engines running at the same time. This referee
gives an indication of the best move, along with its estimate as to how sure it
is about its choice. Does it make Shredder play a stronger game? I don't know.
At the strength that these engines play at, it would be presumptuous of me to
judge the quality of play with triple brain enabled. However, I do have some
observations to share. First of all, at the first move of the game, one would
expect there to be very little certainty as to the best move (ok, so maybe it is d4). And the output of the
engines bear this out - with a very low certainty of the proper move. I noticed
that in instances where there was a fairly obvious positional move to be made,
that the certainty of the triple brain was still on the order of a few percent.
I would have expected it to be a bit higher. In instances where there is a
forced recapture of material, one would expect the certainty to be very high,
and it is. Positions with clear tactical continuations also have high
certainties. So I think what I am getting at here is that the triple brain
behaves approximately as one would expect it should. It is most useful in
tactical situations. Whether it makes the program play stronger chess is a
subject of debate. In any case, it is another point of data that can be used
when analyzing a game, and it passes my simple sanity check.
Another
interesting tidbit to note is that this approach seems to be part of a thesis
project by Stefan Meyer-Kahlen. The triple-brain feature seems to be an
outgrowth of the so-called "three hirn" (roughly translated meaning
three heads) algorithm, the brainchild of Prof. Ingo Althofer. In the original
three-hirn approach, a human is used as a referee for two engines operating in
infinite analysis mode. This referee decides when a move should be made, and
which move is best. However, the referee cannot make a move that is not
suggested by the engines. The triple brain operates in much the same way, with
the computer making the decision between the two engines, and also managing
time usage and providing a indication of the move's certainty.
The Battle of the Engine Protocols
In
the beginning of this article, I mentioned that the WM-Paket contained a number
of engines and GUIs. While this is usually a good deal for the consumer, it
also leads to a certain amount of confusion. There are an increasing number of
engine interfaces and GUIs, such that it's sometimes difficult for the average
person to keep them all straight. So if you could care less about engine
formats (and are only planning on using Shredder 5), then skip to the next
section. What follows now is a short discussion of the engine types supported
in Shredder 5:
Some
of you may remember the MCS engine protocol. It was introduced with Shredder 3,
partly as an answer to the increasing dominance of the Chessbase engines. The
only other programs that would work with MCS were Genius 6.5, Shredder and
Chess Assistant 5.
With
version 5, the situation has changed again. The Shredder 5 GUI now supports two
types of engines interfaces - Winboard and UCI. The latter protocol is being
promulgated by Stefan Meyer-Kahlen as an answer to some shortcomings in
Winboard.
UCI
is a good move, for several reasons. First, it is an open protocol, so others
can use it without charge or limitations. Second, it addresses some problems
when using Winboard engines under some of the more complex multimedia GUIs
(like time sync issues). Third, it provides an easy mechanism to control things
like hash size and tablebase paths through a GUI. Fourth, it provides copy
protection, so that engine authors can protect their intellectual property.
It
is important to note that there is another GUI that uses this engine protocol -
Chess Assistant 6. This may not sound like much, but no other competing
protocol has support across two software houses. As far as chess engines go,
UCI is used by SoS, Gandalf, Lambchop, Patzer and Capture. These last four
engines will be available on an upcoming CD from Gambitsoft.
Conclusion
I
think that that the primary audience for this software collection is the
serious player looking for an analysis tool. Stronger players with slow
machines may be able to play some of the Shredder personalities, but most users
will want to use a winboard engine for handicap play, since Shredder is simply
too strong in most modes. Shredder also works well with Chess Assistant, and I
feel that users of this program should look at the WM-Paket if they want to add
a few more analysis engines to their arsenal.
Without
a doubt, this program is extremely strong. In an environment where competition
is fierce, and most programs take turns at the number one spot, Shredder has
remained king of the hill.
Special Notes for
Tablebase Users
In
addition to the tablebase files provided on the CDs, you also get a compiled
version of Eugene Nalimov's program called tbgen. This is similar to the
Chessbase offering, except it does not have the nice GUI front-end that
Chessbase provides.
Special Notes for Users
of the DGT board
Many
people will be delighted to hear that Shredder supports the DGT board (and
smartboard as well, but I did not test this). As I mentioned previously, there
is spoken move announcement, which is a must with this board. I found the sound
to be a little muddled, and playback to be somewhat processing intensive.
Overall though, it works pretty well, and the comments that Karpov makes during
the game a quite typical of what you would hear during a skittles game (you can
turn this off if you want). Position setup provides a nice feature - you can
reverse the orientation of the board from a dialog box (rather than having to
physically turn the board). Overall, the support is decent, but I did have some
trouble when using Winboard engines, move announcement and the DGT board all at
the same time. For some reason there was a problem with synchronization of the
Shredder clock, and the winboard engine's clock. This caused some engines to
lose on time, or post messages about the sync problem. To the program's credit,
it did not try and cover this fact up and I hope this issue will be resolved in
a bug fix.
Special notes for Chess
Assistant (CA) users
Those
of you that use CA 5 should note that Shredder 5 does not have an MCS version
of the engine (only UCI), so this means that you need to use CA 6, if you want
to use the Shredder 5 engine within CA. Users of CA 5 should note that the MCS
versions of Shredder 3 and 4 are included on the CDs, so you will be able to
use these within CA.
Those
that are using the Shredder 5 engine in conjunction with CA 6 should note that
the engine type "UCI" should be selected in the Chess Assistant
engines setup dialog box, and you should select the engine.exe file instead of
the Shredder 5 executable. You should also note that you cannot access the
triple brain from within CA, for this you must use Shredder. And finally,
Shredder's score is presented in CA in a format that is consistent with all the
other engines (i.e. + score means white has the advantage).
Additionally,
the SoS and Nimzo engines work within Chess Assistant 6 as well.
Copy Protection:
Shredder 5 and SoS: Must have CD in drive for first start of program,
afterwards CD is not needed
Nimzo 2000 Winboard: None
Nimzo 2000 Stand alone: Must have CD in drive every time program is used
Nalimov Tablebases: None
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