Translated by Milena Tomić

There are several rating lists of chess computers and chess programmes for PCs conducted in the world. Certainly, the most important, the most competent and the best is the Swedish Chess Federation SSDF rating list. Since 1988 till today there have been played almost 100 000 games on different hardware resources and there have been published 30 rating lists, which reflected the situation in computer chess at the moment of their publishing. The most successful were the programmes of the Fritz family which won the first place 20 times, followed by Shredder with 5 winnings, Chess Tiger with 2, while Junior, Hiarcs, Rebel and Chessmaster won the first place once each.

The latest SSDF rating list was published on July 6th 2003, after 92.970 games of chess computers and chess programmes for PCs were played. The programmes were performed on the computers with the Athlon processors at 1200 MHz and 256 MB of RAM memory. The winner was Shredder 7.04 computer programme , the heir of Shredder 7 , and the “engine” was written by Stefan Mayer-Kahlen for the original Shredder's interface, although it can also work in the Chess Base programmes. Shredder 7 won the second place and Fritz 8 -the third. It should be noted that Shredder 7.04 was the first chess programme to go beyond the dream limit of 2800 points by wining exactly 2800 rating points!

It is going to be interesting to see the next rating SSDF list in about a month because it has been announced that “a novice”- Deep Junior 8 , the current world champion, will also enter the competition!

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VI international Magistral tournament of Argentina has been dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Argentinean grandmaster Oscar Pano 's winning of the junior world champion title. Being faithful to the tradition of the two previous tournaments, the tournament organizers put Shredder 7 chess programme into the table in addition to ten competitors, grandmasters and intermasters from the country and the region. As the leading programme on the SSDF list, Shredder 7 was a bit adjusted for this tournament to be as equal as possible with the other competitors. The computer processor was working at 1.6 GHz “only” and the chosen option was to play aggressively which surely did not mean to play best!

After 10 rounds, Shredder 7 won the competition with 8.5 points in 10 rounds, with only three draws and with 2 points more than the vice champion-a grandmaster! In this tournament only Shredder 7 won the “human” grandmaster norm and also the “human” rating of 2752 points!

It is interesting to view all Shredder 's games. There is a feeling that it played easily, even attractively in the endgames. The sacrificing of the queen was very effective in the game with grandmaster Oscar Pano as well as an extraordinary declared rook-knight mate, which the grandmaster did not allow to be realised, so he resigned. There were also other players who played till the moment when Shredder declared checkmate, giving the exact number of moves. Many of them resigned on time, avoiding such unpleasant situations.

Parallel with the main tournament, a spare, somewhat inferior tournament was played, in which Shredder 7 participated as well. In this tournament, too, Shredder 7 chess programme won the first place with 8.5 points from 10 games, allowing its opponents only 3 draws!

In addition, you may view all the Shredder 's games in the main tournament.

All Shredder's games

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