Shredder Classic 4 Questions

[wormtownpaul]

I just purchased Shredder Classic 4. The program and layout seem fine. The non-existent instructional manual and the seemingly worthless help section are extremely disappointing. I have over a dozen questions. I have searched all of these on “help” with no results. Unbelievably, when I tried to send this as an email to shredder support, I was told that such an email address did not exist.

My questions are:

1. What effect does changing the engines have on the play? What, for instance, does “Beancounter” mean?

2. Under engine options, what does “Multipv” mean?

3. Under engine options, what does “Engine with low priority” mean?

4. Under extended, what effect does enabling “position learning” have?

5. Under extended, what are “shredderbases” and “tablebases?” What does it mean to set them to “like TB” and “Normal?” How does “normal” differ from “always?”

6. What point is there is adjusting weights given to “rook extra”, etc., for the player?

7. Under adjusting weights for computer, what does “contempt” mean?

8. What does “clear PosLearning” mean? I’m assuming clear position learning, but I don’t know what that means.

9. What does “center control percent”, etc. mean? I’m assuming the weight you give the computer to these facets so you can create a character, But the default to all but Bishop pair is 100, which is odd. Does lessening them make them weaker players.

10. Reviews led me to believe I could change character of player to aggressive, passive, and others. I have not been able to find such a function.

11. Under book options, I have four choices. What does “Wide” mean? I’m assuming this refers to how heavily the engine will rely on book openings, but that is unclear. If so, “standard” will presumably rely on the book, but not as thoroughly as tournament? I don’t want a 1400 opponent to play an opening like a GM. How do I avoid this?

12. Engine window one time gave me about a six move analysis. I have been unable to get that function back.

13 How do “analysis” and “analyze game” work? What is the difference?

14. What is the “triple brain” function I’ve read about?

15. How do I see the ongoing analyses that the engine gives, as occurs so easy and naturally in Fritz?

16. Does a pdf instructional manual exist that answers all of these questions? If so, I have been unable to fnd it.

[BB+]

I can try to guess some of the answers.

"Beancounter" probably means "use a faster eval that does little more than count material (counting beans)"
"Multipv" means display not only the main line (principal variation), but also secondary lines.
"Engine with low priority" is some sort of Windows thing, that ensures that the engine doesn't take 100% of the cpu time. I don't know this should be set.
"Position learning" usually means that the engine will save information about a position (maybe just out of book), and use it the next time around. "clearing" this should mean to delete any such information.
"shredderbases" and "tablebases" are look-up tables in endgames (usually 5 pieces or less, sometimes 6). "always" means use them always in such a position, which could be time-consuming if disk access is needed. "normal" probably means don't use TBs except near the root.
"contempt" usually means that the computer will avoid draws by taking additional risks.

[Kurt]

Please download the corresponding User Manual, i.e. Deep Shredder 12 UCI
http://www.shredderchess.com/chess-prog ... 2-uci.html
Kurt