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Detailed description of Chess Assistant 8.1
Index
Entering and editing a game is of course one of the basic functions and as so much has
been done to offer more options without making special efforts. Entering moves is done by
moving the pieces, or using Chess Assistant’s function that helps to determine a
destination square of the piece by clicking only once on the piece. This is particularly
practical if you are entering obvious sequences of moves, as the program'll most likely
guess correctly. If you make a mistake then you can just press <Backspace> to erase
the last move, and if you decide to erase the whole variation, then <Delete> key'll
do the job. Adding or removing a diagram is done by clicking on diagram button, and if you
want to add colored comments directly onto the board, press.
In Chess Assistant 6 and 7, however, new options've been created allowing you to do
more than just highlight a square or add an arrow. Now you can shade squares in varying
degrees (and colors), control types of symbols used, and even add text directly onto the
board, setting size, color, and space it'll occupy.
Besides, Chess Assistant allows inclusion of multimedia commentary of all kinds such as
images (.jpg, .gif, and .bmp formats), audio files from external sources (.wav and .mp3
formats) or those you can record directly from a microphone, and video files (.avi and
.mpg formats).
Another common annoyance is that when creating a new base, the library of players is
obviously empty. This means that even if you are entering the games of players included
into the Hugebase library, you'll normally be forced to enter all the player’s
information again. In Chess Assistant 6 a new system's been created so that while entering
a player’s name, you can see it appearing in the list of Hugebase and simply copy the
name with all the references into your base’s library.
Dates can now also be entered in a mini-calendar:
See example in Annotating the game flash demo Part I, Part II and Part III (see also
Annotating moves flash demo). Finally, if you want to annotate a game (or a whole set of
games) quickly with references to the opening novelties and a look at blunders, Chess
Assistant's got several functions to analyze and comment a game automatically.
(9.1. Engines)
Chess Assistant 8.1 keeps this tradition and brings in a few of the best engines
available (Chess Tiger 2004, Delfi, Crafty 19, Ruffian, etc.), and the possibility to
connect a great number of other.
It supports numerous other formats such as UCI, which allows you to connect the World
Champion program Shredder 8, and the rising stars Gandalf 4.32h and SOS; the MCS format
which supports Wchess, for example, and the Winboard format which supports tons of
engines, most of which are freely available for downloading in Internet. There is also
support for Nalimov endgame tablebases both for the engines themselves (such as Chess
Tiger 2004) and as a separate consulting tool. Moreover, if you own an old favorite such
as MChess Pro, Rebel (8, 9, 10), Genius (4 and 5), you can call on them from Chess
Assistant to analyze a position and include their analysis.
The most obvious function of the engine, apart from aiding you to understand the
intricacies of a position, is that it appears to be your training partner. Of course you
can just start a game and play against the engine of your choice using Chess Assistant
opening book, and then set any time control you can think of, including the newly
announced FIDE time controls, for example. However, if at any moment you see a
particularly interesting or funny position, you can choose to play from it as well with a
single click. This allows you to practice easily your opening knowledge, your middlegame
understanding, or endgames that you studied. And if you find it unpleasant to play on the
screen and miss the feeling of a wooden board, you can connect the DGT board and play on
it instead.
(9.2. BookBuilder)
You can also create your own opening book for the engine to play with. The BookBuilder
utility lets you do this using different trees and allowing you to set weights to each
source of information you'll have on the opening book.
What concerns computer chess amateurs that'd like to test different engines or just see
them bash it out, several options are available, including a new comprehensive test suite
mode.You can also run engines in Internet using an ICC computer account.
(9.3. Test Suites)
As for the engines playing against themselves, you can organize matches, even using a
specific starting position, and tournaments (round robin or Swiss) that can be run on
several computers.
The test suite tool was designed to make creating test suites as easy as possible, and
to allow you to see and compare the results in an easy-to-read chart. A test suite can be
an EPD file that you have ready, or if you want to make your own one, you can separate
games with the positions that interested you into a dataset, add a diagram at the key
move, and when in the test suite window tell it to create a test suite from it. That’s
all as for it. You can also attribute point values to positions in order to reward better
those solutions that're harder to find. Once you have run the suite, the results're saved
in an especially created classifier and organized by the test suite and engine in a chart.
The results'll appear highlighting the fastest solutions or showing the move proposed if
the engine failed to find the key move. The results can then be printed or exported to the
Windows clipboard, be pasted wherever you want, in an HTML file, or even an Excel
file!
Index
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