Helping parents grow
       healthier, happier kids!! ™

$45.95

Shredder 7

The record computer world champion!!
It is the most successful tournament programs in the world. Since 1996 Shredder has won the world computer championship four times (1996, 1999, 2000, 2001), in this year's event it came equal first and lost narrowly in the playoff, but winning the computer blitz world championship outright. Now it's out, in a brand-new version, ready to challenge Fritz and co. at the top of the computer ratings lists.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.