Winning starts with what you know
The new version 18 offers completely new possibilities for chess training and analysis: playing style analysis, search for strategic themes, access to 6 billion Lichess games, player preparation by matching Lichess games, download Chess.com games with built-in API, built-in cloud engine and much more.
Shredder
10 now availableNo 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:
Shredders world championship titles:
| € 49.99 (incl. VAT) | US $54.30 (without VAT) | |
| € 99.99 (incl. VAT) | US $108.61 (without VAT) |
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.
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.
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.
| € 49.99 (incl. VAT) | US $54.30 (without VAT) | |
| € 99.99 (incl. VAT) | US $108.61 (without VAT) |
