Shredder
10 now available
No other chess program has won as many world championship titles in recent
years as Shredder. Now the program has become even stronger. Shredder 10 is
showing a drastic increase in performance – about 80 Elo points above
all previous versions.
Shredder has always been famous for excellent strategy and extraordinary endgame
technique. Shredder 10 continues in this tradition, and now comes with highly
compressed endgame files. This increases access speed by a factor of 1000 to
10,000! The consequence is that Shredder 10 can use the perfect endgame knowledge
of its “Shredderbases” more effectively and calculates positions
much faster.
Shredder 10 includes:
- The original Fritz 9 interface, with extensive training and entertainment
features for beginners, club players and grandmasters. Naturally the Shredder
10 engine runs under the Fritz interface
- Full and free one year access to the ChessBase Playchess server, where
you can play games against people all over the world.
- Special Shredder tournament opening book: The enhanced and extended Shredder
opening book gives you full statistical information about every move that
has been played in the current position. In addition you get a database with
1 million historic and current games.
Shredders world championship titles:
- Jakarta 1996: World micro-computer chess champion
- Paderborn 1999: Computer chess world champion
- London 2000: World micro-computer chess champion
- Maastricht 2001: World micro-computer chess champion
- Maastricht 2002: Computer chess blitz world champion
- Graz 2003: Computer chess world champion and blitz world champion
- Tel Aviv 2004: Computer chess blitz world champion
- Reykjavik 2005: Computer chess blitz world champion
Buy Shredder
Interview with Shredder author Stefan Meyer-Kahlen
Q: In the past years a number of new programs have been
achieving remarkable success against the established top programs like Shredder
and Junior. For instance last year the program Zap!Chess won the computer chess
world championship. Was that a big surprise for you?
Stefan Meyer-Kahlen: Yes, when Zap!Chess won in Reykjavik
it was a very big surprise – not just for me. But the next world championship
in Turin may paint a different picture. I have a good feeling about Shredder.
We will see if Reykjavik was just a one-time success.
Shredder author Stefan Meyer-Kahlen
Q: What makes these new programs so strong?
SMK: In the case of Zap!Chess it was the very well-implemented
use of parallel hardware. Zap!Chess simply got the very most out of the computer
system it was using. Good hardware has always played an important role in computer
chess.
Q: Are professional programmers faced with a new situation?
SMK: Competition is always good. I personally am very glad
to see the new and strong programs. Because of them it has become easier to
discover weakness in Shredder, which animates me to find new ways of making
it stronger.
Q: Grandmasters still work mainly with programs like
Fritz or Shredder. How come? Have chess professionals missed the latest developments
in computer chess?
SMK: I think grandmasters know very well what they are doing.
Especially the professionals who earn a living from the game. Many have used
Shredder and Fritz for a long time and got used to them. They know the strengths
and weaknesses of these programs very well, they know exactly when to trust
them and when to be sceptical about their evaluations. Due to the long development
time both Shredder and Fritz are very mature programs which very seldom really
screw up. It is this reliability that professionals appreciate.
Q: What are the criteria for deciding which are the best
chess programs?
SMK: There are a number, and each user will have his own
definition. Scoring well in engine matches against other programs is certainly
one standard, but also the ability to provide precise and reliable analysis,
or the ability to learn efficiently. For many users the style of play is important.
So it is difficult to come to a general conclusion which single program is
the best.
Main improvements
Q: So what are the advantages of Shredder compared to
the newcomers of the past year?
SMK: Apart from the points discussed above there is the ability
of Shredder to remember what it has already analysed and to use this very efficiently
in subsequent analysis. It is also important that Shredder can use its new
"Shredderbases" in the endgame. They are new, highly compressed endgame
databases – all 3, 4 and 5-piece endings take up just 157 MB, compared
to the 7500 MB required in the traditional Nalimov format. The new super-compression
means that the Shredderbases can be loaded completely into memory and, with
the help of very fast access algorithms, there is a 1000-fold speedup in the
access times, compared to the traditional tablebases. This means that Shredder
10 can use the endgame database earlier and more intensely, and that the search
is hardly slowed down at all.
Q: Are there other areas in which Shredder 10 has undergone
similar improvements?
SMK: The latest version of Shredder places more weight on
mobility than before, and it can handle passed pawns much better. But I have
been working hard on almost all aspects of the program, and improved them wherever
I could. I must say, though, that the new Shredderbases provide the most dramatic
improvement. In certain endgames they produce unrivalled results.
Multi-processor systems
Q: User often ask about dual core and 64 bit systems.
Can you explain these concepts and tell us whether they are genuinely useful?
Can chess players expect to profit substantially from the new hardware, and
what should they pay attention to?
SMK: Dual core processors are essentially two computers working
in parallel. This means that theoretically they can be twice as fast as a single
core system. In chess programming is is not so easy to split the task and use
parallel processors. However Deep Shredder manages very well and actually works
twice as fast on a dual core system, which makes it 60 to 70 Elo points stronger.
The 64 bit system is a different story. Here the most important advantage is
that one can have more than two Gigabytes for the program, which is the limit
for 32 bit systems. More memory means larger hash tables, and that is quite
relevant for long games and for very deep analysis.
Q: And how will the development of Shredder continue?
SMK: There are still many thinks to do. Naturally it is important
to further improve programs tactically, because even if you play very beautiful
chess you will still lose if you have tactical weaknesses. But I believe that
the main weakness of chess programs today is their positional understanding.
This is where I will be doing the most work.
Still haven't ordered it?
