Shredder 7

By Peter Schreiner

The new Shredder is now available and can be ordered from your distributor or directly from the ChessBase Shop. Shredder 7 is based on the program that played in the computer chess world championship in Maastricht earlier this year and shared first place with Junior from Israel. In the tiebreak games that followed Shredder was somewhat unlucky to lose, so that Junior took the ICCA title and Shredder became vice champion. But the program had already won another important title in the same tournament. In Maastricht it won the world computer blitz championship with an incredible score of eight points in nine games (seven wins and two draws). And this was achieved by a program that has the reputation of not being too strong at blitz!

Stefan Meyer-Kahlen during the playoff against Shay Bushinsky in Maastricht

So what are the main differences between Shredder 6 and the new version? Shredder 7 has a much more efficient search and can achieve speeds that are 30-50% faster than its predecessor. It also profits from many modifications in the evaluation function. For instance it evaluates the relation of knight to bishop more precisely in relation to the board position, which in turn leads to a more balanced positional play in the middlegame.

Special 3D piece set for Shredder 7

Shredder 7 has also learned a lot in the very critical areas of king safety and long-range strategies. This not only makes the program harder to beat, it also causes it to attack more ferociously. After all knowing how to look after your king's safety automatically implies that it will understand when the opponent is not doing such a great job in this respect.

You can zoom in and view the board from any angle

Shredder 7 comes with two different interfaces. You can either run it under the latest Fritz 8 interface, which is extensively discussed elsewhere in this magazine and which includes access to the Playchess server. Or you can use the original Shredder interface that was developed by Stefan Meyer-Kahlen. The latter allows you to create openings books for Pocket Fritz, another program by Stefan (and described elsewhere in this magazine).

You may want to try Shredder's special science fiction pieces

The program comes with a special openings book that was prepared by Sandro Necci and carefully optimised for the playing style of the new Shredder. This openings book can be used with both interfaces.

Shredder 7 runs on single and multi-processor systems (i.e. there is no separate "Deep" version). It can also be used for analysis in ChessBase 7 or 8.

More about the general Shredder features can be found in the full review of Shredder 6