Fritz 5.

32
English Instructions

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English Instructions
Fritz5.32 is the 32Bit version of the famous chess software Fritz5. The program preserves the unique dynamic playing style of Fritz5 while profiting from the 32Bit environment to gain playing strength. Porting to 32Bit has made the graphical interface faster and leaner as well. Finally Fritz5.32 profits from the accelerated 32Bit database access of ChessBase 7.0. This leaflet describes the new functions and is an add-on to the main Fritz5 manual. New in comparison with Fritz5.00:
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. Improved 32Bit engine by Frans Morsch 32Bit integration and long file name support. 32Bit Engines Comet, Crafty, Doctor? 3.0 and EXchess included. Historic Fritz engines and opening books included (e.g. Hongkong) Improved opening book. Automatic engine tournaments. Pondering in engine matches on dual processor boards. Full elo management with start list generation, and GM/IM norms. Cross table display. Spy function for beginners. Compare analysis of different engines (uses colored variations). Human time bonus in Blitz and Fischer mode. Printing in colour. Next best move. Improved correspondence analysis. Material balance display in notation. Game minimum for book lines. Test suite management: Delete single engine results, paste results into Excel. Node speed display. Elapsed move time display. Contempt value, aggressivity and selectivy configurable in Fritz5.32 engine Lock analysis engine/goto lock position. Coloured variations in notation New notation format (ChessBase7.0 style) Support of ChessBase 7.0 database text functions Unlimited copying of games New mate engine with heuristic search Scroll main line: every new variation/only new moves. Two line best variation display (full history) Variation board. Search games with board position by one click in notation. Search for annotations. Doubling in rated games. New true type fonts. Improved PGN conversion ***** ***** ***** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** **

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

Clip analysis. Fast engine switch in watch mode. Truncate game/delete remaining moves. Delete all commentary/delete thinking time and evaluationcommentary. Set annotation medals. Set annotations before moves. Improved engine loading and hash table configuration. Endgame database QQ-Q added (less evaluation errors from EGRom) Faster start up of program Color coding of rising/falling evaluation in variation display Online registration. Engine logos Append games to database. Configurable resigning Change notation/game list/search info font Show clocks in analysis. Configurable print header. Windows background colours in notation, game list and search info display. Enter machine name in user dialog for test sets, engine matches, etc. Auto232 support for all engines Import EPD.

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The CD furthermore includes the original programs Fritz3(DOS) and Fritz5(16BitWindows).

Installation Please run Setup.exe from the Fritz CD. Fritz5.32 and other ChessBase programs use several common files (e.g. for the engines). Please install Fritz5.32 in a folder ChessBase. Example: C:\Program files\ChessBase\Fritz532. The installation will then create an external engine folder C:\Program files\ChessBase\Engines

Playing and Fun Human time bonus in Blitz games If you play Blitz against Fritz, you can give yourself more time than the program. This makes sense: You play in a competitive setting with time control, the engine is not handicapped but nevertheless leaves you the chance to achieve something by concentrated play:

In the above example, the engine gets five minutes per game, while the human bonus is ten minutes, adding up to a total of 15 minutes. Furthermore you can give yourself a Fischer-style bonus for each move. Spy Menu Coach. The spy indicates with a red arrow what Fritz is planning to do with his next move. A very useful feature for beginners to avoid dropping pieces. Doubling in rated games Did you ever play chess for money? Than you know what doubling means: You leave your opponent the choice between resigning or continuing at double stake. In the beginning, each side may double. After that, doubling goes alternate. If your opponent doubles and you accept, only you may double again, now offering to play for the fourfold sum.

Control resigning In menu Setup General Options, you can specify the resigning behaviour of the engine: The choice is Never late early. Sometimes you may prefer to mate the bastard. In engine matches/tournaments, early resigning saves a lot of time. The engine gives up when its evaluation is worse than -4.5 three times in a row.

Analysis Improved correspondence analysis The correspondence analysis is meant for in-depth investigation of a single position which is of course not limited to correspondence chess. There are now two parameters in addition to Fritz5: Extra time at root. If you want the engine to analyse the first move longer than the others, add a value here. Say you set a time of 3,600 secs. This will cause the analysis to search each move for one hour. The overall analysis would then take 24h, depending on your branching and variation length. Now add e.g. 14,000 secs for the root, extending the whole analysis by another four hours or so. Extra depth at root. If you work with search depths rather than times, this is the analogous parameter. Branching: White, Black, Both You can limit the branching to white or black moves. Say you want to find the optimal line for white and you are not interested to look at alternatives, that is you want to prove something in the position. Then you select branching = Black. If you want to explore Whites possibilities but for the purpose of clarity you would like to see only the best answer of Black, you select branching = White. Next best move In Watch mode, click right in the search info window and chose next best move. This forces the engine to suppress the currently analysed move and to look at the next best. This feature is only supported by the engines Fritz3, 4, 5, and 5.32.

Opening Book The standard opening book of Fritz has been enhanced: Many lines are longer, while new material from 1997 and 1998 was added. It is compiled exclusively from games played in human tournaments. There are no engine-specific variations or weights because it is intended for use with all Fritz engines which dont have an own book, e.g. Comet, Crafty, Doctor? and EXchess. Therefore the book is now called GENERAL.CTG. The engine will leave the book if less than a certain number of non-won games have been played with the current variation. You can change this value under Book Options

(F4). The default value of Game Minimum is two. This means that Fritz will by default not follow a line which has been played only once in a human game unless the game was won for the side in question.

Engine Research Operating System (EROS) Many functions in Fritz5.32 constitute a kind of operating system for researching the strength and playing characteristics of chess engines: a) Play matches and tournaments b) Automatically maintain elo lists c) Compare general analysis d) Measure and compare solving times in test positions e) Publish your research data: Paste test set results, elo lists and tournament tables into spread sheets like Excel. Fritz 5.32 comes with ten different engines. There are additional top engines available at moderate prices, e.g. Hiarcs, Junior and Nimzo. Engines in the Fritz5.32 package: Fritz5.32 (32Bit) by Frans Morsch Comet A96 (32Bit) by Dr. Ulrich Trke Crafty 15-20 (32Bit) by Prof. Robert Hyatt Doctor? 3.0 (32Bit) by Dr. Hans-Joachim Kraas and Dr. Gnter Schrfer Doctor? 2.0 (16Bit) by Dr. Hans-Joachim Kraas and Dr. Gnter Schrfer EXChess 2.50 (32Bit) by Dan Homan Fritz5 (16Bit) by Frans Morsch Fritz4.01 (16Bit) by Frans Morsch Fritz3.10 (16Bit) by Frans Morsch Fritz1.20 (16Bit) by Frans Morsch

16Bit engines do not run under Windows NT. Furthermore Fritz is prepared for the Hiarcs6 engine. If you own Hiarcs6, please copy the file Hiarcs6.dll from your Hiarcs6 disk into C:\Program files\ChessBase\Engines. If you installed Fritz to a different folder, look for the engines folder there.

Note: the old Fritz engines and the 16Bit Doctor? 2.0 are not automatically installed. If you want to use them, please select them in the custom installation or copy them from the folder History on the CD. Here you will also find all original books (Fritz1.fbk, Fritz3.fbk, Fritz4.fbk) and the never-published book which Fritz3 used when winning the World Championship in Hongkong ahead of Deep Blue. Do not copy the old file Hiarcs6.eng into the new engines folder. It is not compatible to Fritz5.32. Engine tournaments The previous Fritz versions supported matches between two engines. However there is a peculiar effect in computer chess: Program A might do very well against B but score badly against C who loses regularly against B, something nearly impossible with human players. To estimate playing strength, one has to match a program against a wide variety of opponents. So the optimal way to rank chess engines is to play round robin tournaments. Fritz5.32 does this fully automatic. You invite some engines with opening books to a tournament, set a time control and leave the computer alone. If you need the machine, a tournament can be interrupted and continued later. Select New Tournament in the Engine Research menu:

Press Invite Engine to add a new engine. Specify hash size and an openings book. You can modify the settings of an engine by clicking Edit. To set one opening book or one

hash size for all participants, click Unify book and Unify hash. Tournaments will always be round robin. Cycles means the number of games an engine will play against another. A standard tournament has one cycle more cycles take more time but decrease the statistical fluctuations. If you would like to take part yourself, click Invite human. When you have time to play a game, open the tournament and click Next human game. Or press Ctrl-Shift-H in the main screen. In case you maintain an elo list for your engines (see Elo management, page 14), click Link elo list. This will set all elo numbers for the engines to their ratings in this list. Whenever your computer is free to play games from the tournament, call Open tournament from the Engine Research menu and click Run/continue. Compare analysis This function is useful both for normal chess interest and engine research. You have a game (or position) and let it get analysed by different engines. Each engine annotates each move with its own variation and search parameters. This highlights differences between engines. This means also a valuable analysis tool because the different engines open new perspectives for understanding a game.

In engine research it is interesting to compare two versions of one engine. In the above example Fritz5.00 and Fritz5.32 are chosen. Direct version comparison is best done with a fixed search depth, rather than time. If you try this yourself, you will find that the evaluation of those two engines are in general quite similar while the search itself often works differently. Activate node count to see how many positions the engine has

searched for the current version. If you add a new engine, you can specify a Variation color to distinguish its analysis from the other engines. Support for dual processor boards under NT Engine matches on a standard computer lack one interesting aspect: Pondering (thinking in the opponents time) is not possible since the single processor is busy with the other engine. However on a Windows NT dual processor board you can play engine matches with pondering enabled. Each engine will simply get its own processor. Node speed If you have a higher screen resolution (1024*768) or if you select a small chess board the info window will display a node counter. Click on the counter field to switch between node speed display (positions per second) or total count. A value of 200kN/s means that the engine looks at 200,000 positions per second. Node speed is not a criterion for playing strength the very strong and very slow Hiarcs is the best counter example. Fast switch between different analysis engines If you load more than one engine (Levels Load engine) in analysis mode, you can quickly switch between the engines by clicking on the name of the current engine (or the name of the current book) in the search info window. Keyboard shortcut: Alt-F3. Auto232 device driver You can connect two Fritzes on different computers with a serial cable (null modem) to play against each other. Call Load device in Setup (Shift-Alt-J). Activate the Auto232 driver and specify the COM port for your serial cable. Do the same on the other computer. To start a game, call Engine vs. device (Levels Computer chess) or press Ctrl-Alt-J. You need the original Fritz5 CD in your CD drive for Auto232 games. Historical note: The CD contains the old engines Fritz1, 3 and 4 with their original openings books. You can use those engines for autoplaying as well. Engine parameters of the Fritz5.32 engine Contempt value (default = 15)

A positive contempt value lets the program prefer a bad position over a draw by repetition of moves. A negative contempt value lets the program show

respect. It assumes a strong opponent and accepts a draw by repetition of moves even in a better position. The contempt value is measured in 1/100 pawns. Aggressiveness (default = 0)

Influences the playing style. Negative aggressiveness will lead to passive play. Selectivity (default = 2)

Denotes the number of plies reduced by the null-move. A value of zero means that the null-move is switched off. Higher selectivity tends to inflict tactical blindness. A value of three should give about the same playing strength but will considerably change the playing characteristics. Engine parameters of the Crafty 15-20 engine No tricks Activates code to evade typical horizon attacking tricks of human players. This evolved out of Bob Hyatts year-long experience with grandmasters who played Crafty on the internet chess servers. A typical human attacking scheme would be the opening of the h-file by 1.Ng5 h6 2.h4! Switch off when playing computers. Computer opponent Deactivates the draw evasion strategies of Crafty. Switch on when playing computers.

Enhanced User Interface Search info window Click with the right mouse button into the search info window in analysis mode. The search info window contains the calculated lines. This opens a menu: Lock A locked engine continues to analyse its current position when the board position changes. An unlocked engine would start analysing the new position. Goto lock position Jumps to the position where the engine has been locked. More/less lines

Increases/decreases the number of best variations an engine looks at in analysis. Next best move Calculates the next best move in single-line mode (only supported by the Fritz engines). Threat Calculates the threat (or the threats if in multivariation mode). Clip analysis Copies the lines in the search info window to the windows clipboard so that they might get pasted into a text document. Scroll main line If activated, the best line is displayed as a scrolling list. If the evaluation rises or drops continuously, the best line is displayed in green (rising) or red (falling evaluation). Scroll new moves Scrolls the main line only if the best move changes. This is the most instructive setting. Variation board Displays the end position of the current best variation in a small diagram besides the variation window. Extra search info Switches the scrolling main line to two-line display. The second line contains evaluation, current search depth, time spent and Kilonodes (positions calculated in 1000s). The engines Fritz5.00 and Fritz5.32 show the current load of the hash tables. Most other engines do not support this. They display the elapsed move time instead. Notation window Click right in the notation window to open a menu with annotation and other functions: Search games Searches in the current database for all games containing the position after the move you clicked on.

Promote line Promotes a variation to main variation. Delete line Deletes the line you clicked on. Delete remaining moves Deletes all moves after the clicked one. Truncate moves Deletes all moves before the current position which now becomes the starting position. Delete all commentary Deletes all variations and comments. Delete thinking time/evaluations. Removes the thinking time and evaluation/search depth commentary which Fritz stores in the game notation (if set in General config). Text before move Multilingual text annotation before the clicked move. Text after move Multilingual text annotation after the clicked move. Variation color Sets a highlight color for the current variation and all its subvariations. Set mark Annotate a move with !, etc. Set evaluation Evaluate the position with =, +=, etc. Diagram (print) Set a diagram marker. If you print this game, a diagram will be embedded for this position. Material Activates the material balance display. Font

Select a notation font. Fritz comes with two new sets of TrueType fonts: FigurineCB AriesSP and FigurineCB TimeSP. Clocks in analysis If you prefer to see the clock in analysis mode, uncheck Hide clock in analysis in Setup Screen layout. Normally the clock just wastes space which is better used for the game notation. If you examine the engine in test position you might however be interested to see how much time has elapsed.

Printing Call menu Setup Print parameter to select printing of game notations in colour or to specify header lines for the print outs.

Database functions Search for annotations Since many Fritz functions put annotations into games, the search mask now supports filtering out of games with certain annotations. You could e.g. look for all ?? (set by the blunder check annotation) or all critical middlegame positions (set in an engine match at strongly differing evaluations). Or you could find training questions inserted by the natural language analysis. Copying games The 16Bit limitations of Fritz5 have been overcome. You can now select and copy an arbitrary number of games with Shift-Cursor-Down in the database window. Append games Click right in the database window to call Append games. Select a database and all games from this database will be added to the current game list. Cross tables Click on the first game of a tournament in the game list. Then click right and select Cross table. Fritz generates a cross table for the tournament. Also useful for engine tournaments and matches. Import EPD The EPD format is a historic format used to store test positions for chess programs. If you have never heard about it, you may safely ignore it the PGN format is much

more flexible as an independent format between different chess programs. This function imports all positions of an EPD file and appends them to the current database. Database window font Click right on the game list to change the font. Fritz comes with two new sets of TrueType fonts: FigurineCB AriesSP and FigurineCB TimeSP.

Elo management Elo numbers express the playing strength of chess players. Matches and tournaments played between chess engines require elo evaluation to produce ranking lists. Fritz5.32 contains a complete elo list management. If you have an existing elo list, you can evaluate a tournament on its basis and the list will be updated accordingly. IM and GM norms are automatically detected and titles awarded. The question is: How to get an elo list? Creating an elo start list Unix father and computer chess pioneer Ken Thompson suggested an algorithm to create an elo list out of an arbitrary games database. Treat the database as one huge tournament: Each player gets the same starting elo (e.g. 2400) which enables the calculation of a tournament performance for everybody. In the next step one puts in this performance value as starting value to create new and more exact performances. After a couple of rounds the elo numbers converge to stable values. The absolute values of the elo numbers thus gained depend on the start values and are not determined by the algorithm. One therefore has to gauge the list, i.e. to add or substract a single constant value to everybody. If you do it for humans, take a stable player like Dr. John Nunn. Add an offset to your list so that John Nunn gets his usual 2600. Elo management in Fritz is motivated by the engine tournaments, however you can easily process human results as well. It is e.g. quite exciting to create elo lists for historical game data. However correct and unified spelling of player names is absolutely crucial for this. So elo lists will work only with the high-quality databases from ChessBase (e.g. MegaDatabase99), because most other databases contain player names of very different spellings. Moreover game selections which do not contain complete tournaments distort ratings.

For engines, a good start list should be based on 300-500 games at time controls not faster than 25 Blitz on a 233MMX. Errors in the start list are no big problem because after a few tournaments the engines will approach their correct values. To create an elo start list, select the games in the database window which should be used for calculation. If you want to take the whole database, press CTRL-A. Click right and call Create elo start list. Note: The start list needs a minimum number of games per player. If the density is not high enough (database too small or too many players), creation will fail. The program will ask you for a file name. If you take an existing elo list, its contents will be overwritten. After the calculation, you have to gauge the list. The algorithm assumes that the average elo of the players in the database is 2400. If this is not the case, the elos numberst will all be too low or too high. Click on Gauge and enter a correction offset. Immediately after creation of a start list, the number of games processed per player is shown. As soon as you gauge the list or start adding tournaments, this figure is replaced by the number of games from new tournaments (initially zero). Viewing an existing elo list (Ctrl-Shift-V) In the menu Engine Research, select View elo list:

Click Clip to copy the whole list in tabbed format to the Windows clipboard. You could then e.g. paste it into a spread sheet. Use Shift/Ctrl-Click to select players and press Delete, to remove them from the list. Click Tournaments to open an inventory of all tournaments evaluated for this list. With a fresh start list, this will be empty.

For elo calculation, tournaments are processed in chronologically weighted order: More recent tournaments weigh heavier than older ones. You can enable/disable selected tournaments temporarily to see their influence on the total list. A disabled tournament will not be used for rating calculation. Elo evaluating new games To rate the games of a tournament or match, select them in the list. Click right and call Add to elo list. You can rate single games. For GM and IM norms a minimum of six rated games per tournament is required. If a player scores three norms, a title is noted in the main list.

Fritz Engine for ChessBase 7.0 For CB7 older than October 1998, please copy the file Fritz532.eng from ChessBase\Engines into the folder ChessBase\CB70\Engines.

If your CB7 is younger than October 1998, it will automatically detect the engine folder ChessBase\Engines created by Fritz5.32 and use the engines from this folder. If you now miss an engine in CB7 which was available before the installation of Fritz (=before switching to the new engine folder), please copy it manually from ChessBase\CB70\Engines to ChessBase\Engines. This is usually the case for the Cdrom400.eng (Access of endgame databases).