Shredder Chess

I recently started to play chess again. I've always been a casual player, I enjoy the game, but never really read books or got serious about it.

Some of the most enjoyable games I've played have been against players of similar skill, who probably have a similar chess background. Unfortunately, I'm not always able to find people or time to play chess in person, so I sometimes play against a chess program. Some of the chess programs I've used are:

• Colossus Chess and Cyrus Chess, on the ZX Spectrum
• ChessMaster, Battle Chess, and GNU Chess, on the PC
• Chess Free, on the Android

My general impression of chess programs is that they're imbalanced: they either play very strong or very weak chess. At the strong end of the spectrum, many chess engines play quite well, and I feel that I lose the game without really understanding why I lost or what I could have done differently. At the weak end of the spectrum, the chess engine tends to make really obvious mistakes, like nonsensical trades, that appear almost random, and it's no fun to win a game like that. If the chess engine has a "level" setting, to make it more or less strong, the levels appear discontinuous, where changing the setting even by a little makes the engine strength change by a lot.

The most recent chess program I played, Chess Free, uses a "probabilistic search engine" called TreeBeard. The game can be tuned by level, from 1 to 10. When I tune it anywhere from levels 1-4, I can win handily, as the game makes really silly mistakes; level 5 however, is far too strong, I think I've only won one or two games against it.

I spent a bit of time searching for a chess engine that doesn't suffer from these problems, and I think I found it: it's called Shredder Chess. I've played a dozen games against it at various levels, and it's amazing: not only can it match my level extremely well, but it feels like I'm playing against a human! It doesn't make obviously bad mistakes, and its level of tactical play can be very closely matched to mine: whenever I lose, the engine dials down its strength by some amount, whenever I win, it goes in the opposite direction, eventually settling at a level close to mine. The various engine strength levels are subtly different, without discontinuous jumps one way or another.

It seems that modern chess engines, like Fritz, Rybka, or Shredder are now arguably able to handily beat even the strongest human players, especially if they can run on parallel hardware. So recent chess engine research appears to be increasingly focused on making chess playing enjoyable for human players, rather than focusing on pure strength

Shredder Chess is available on all major platforms, including Android. The main difference between these platforms is the GUI and its ability to show you intermediate moves, the current positional "score" of the board, what the computer is thinking, and so on. The Android version also has the ability to also show chess puzzles, which can be turned into actual games if you wish. The price for the classic engine is modest and, in my opinion, well-worth it.

If you enjoy chess, I highly recommend Shredder Chess!