Master Chess 7000 med Stockfish Engine

Et alternativt og rimelig sjakkdatabaseprogram med 1,8 mill. partier kombinert med en råsterk analysemotor blant de få seriøse konkurrentene til Rybka. Utgiveren påberoper den en realistisk og menneskelig forståelse.

Du kan bruke basen med motor som moderne verktøy for analyser, partikommentarer og utprinting, og det kan både importere og eksportere partier i pgn-format. Det tilbys også varierte muligheter for mer fancy brettstørrelser og visning av stilllingene med ulike farger. Databasen har 1,8 mill. partier og helt fram til juli 2010.

Stockfish-motoren er i utgangspunktet en gratis motor som faktisk er utviklet av norske(!) Tord Romstad Källkvist, sammen med Marco Costalba og Joona Kiiski.. Romstad er tidligere kjent som en bra juniorspiller tidlig på 90-tallet for både Bærum og Gjøvik.

Det er den amerikanske utgiveren og Roman Dzindzichashvili som markedsfører dette med helt spesielt "menneskelig" spill og analyse fra dette programmet.

Produktet er et rimelig alternativ som står på egne bein. Det kan nok ikke legges rett inn på plattformene ChessBase eller Chess Assistant.

Lance Martin har skrevet denne positive produktomtalen som utgiveren selv publiserer:

It was back in 1989 that I stood in line with about 200 other people to watch a game between World Champion Garry Kasparov and IBM’s latest adventure into the field of public relations, Deep Thought. At the time IBM was the leading computer hardware company in the world. I watched from the floor above the game playing area where the moves were being transmitted from the machine to the player downstairs who sat opposite Mr. Kasparov. It wasn’t so much that Deep Thought lost that game but the fact that it didn’t know it was losing until the checkmate was imminent. The look of desperation during the last 30 minutes on computer programmer Hsu’s face told the tale as everyone upstairs cheered to the end of Garry’s beautiful Sicilian. Garry came upstairs after the game and laughingly told us that he felt good about defending mankind against the machine.

We have come a long way in the past 20 years. Instead of computers that play against us, we use computers to help us beat our opponents. Instead of science geeks building computers that play chess we have chess geeks that build software to give us insight into the correct moves to play in any given position. We have gone from the era of Big Blue to the time of RYBKA and STOCKFISH. The interim period saw the end of American dominance in the chess computer field.

RYBKA was the major predecessor of Stockfish and was built by IM Vasik Rajilch of Czechoslovakia. It is as if the American’s gave up all hope of competing with the small foreign company and its new team. In the time since then men like Tord Romstad, Joona Kiiski, and Marco Costalba in Norway and Finland have taken over the chess computer industry. Meanwhile, in the last few years the brainchild of Chess enthusiast and mathematician Tord Romstad of Norway has become the top computer engine in the world. There are quite a few differences between this and the IBM program not least of which is that all of the members of the programming team for STOCKFISH and MASTERCHESS are rated chess players. The purpose of the new computers is to help chess players rather than to beat them. This is an attitude that was foreign to the American computer makers.

The two major chess software companies, Convekta and Chess Base have both put out copies of the old Sheriff. Masterchess 7000 is being presented to the public by a small team that would find it hard to compete dollar wise with the big two. "