I'd like to start analyzing some of my games. Are there any substantial differences in the analysis engines or their corresponding generated reports?
I'm mainly considering Aquarium, Fritz (12 or 13), Shredder, and Rybka, though I'd consider others if they're strong in their explanations.
My hope is that I can kick off an analysis for an hour or so to generate a report that I can examine later (usually without the computer).
Thoughts and suggestions?
I can't speak for the other programs, but Fritz 13 has some cool features that I enjoy for game analysis (which I do a lot of).
I posted an example of the "Let's Check" distributed analysis feature on my chess blog at http://tacticstime.com/?p=1430
Basically what this does is take a game, break it into individual positions, then distributes those positions to those users who are volunteering their engines for use.
Each engine does an analysis of each position, then returns the result back to the "cloud". Then you can pull the analysis for each position back down from the cloud (My example on my blog hopefully shows what I am talking about if this is unclear).
The rest of the analysis features haven't really changed much in the past couple of years (full analysis, which has the text that you are describing, blunder check, explain all moves, etc), so if you don't care about "Let's Check" you could probably get an older version of Fritz pretty cheap on eBay or somewhere.
The "Full Analysis" can be cool, but isn't really going to explain things as much as spit out some canned expressions. The evaluation graph is also really nice, but again this hasn't changed in years.
To me the most useful thing that the chess engines can do is point out missed tactics in games, which is what I use it for.
I really like the "Live Book" and "Let's Check" in Fritz 13, and to me this was worth the upgrade from Fritz 12.
Cheers,
Tim
Thanks for the details. I understand your description and I'll take a look at the blog next.
The best instruction that I've found so far on using a chess engine to help improve playing ability is this:
http://www.chesscentral.com/Chess_Engine_Software_Analysis_P2_a/Chess_Engine_Software_Analysis_P1_a/209.htm
... but it doesn't describe any differences in the chess engines.
RE: Fritz 13, does the "Lets check" option obviate the need for or improvements from the multicore version, like Deep Fritz? Or, does a multi-core matter (when my rating's only in the 1500s)?
Fritz 13 doesn't take advantage of a computer with more than one processor. I imagine at some point they will release "deep fritz 13" which will do this.
The "deep" version will just take advantage of stronger hardware, and crunch more variations, faster. The output is basically the same either way.
The "Let's Check" just spreads out the analysis to a bunch of different computers, all of which might be running different software. So one position might have analysis done with Rybka 4, and another with Deep Fritz 12, and another with Shredder. The analysis is stored in the cloud, so any future people can access it as well.