Detailed description of Chess Assistant Light
1. Database
2. List and splitting
3. View mode
4. Playing a game
5. Analysis
6. Searches
7. Trees and Cap data
Trees are easily one of the most important tools players have at their disposal. A tree
is a way to organize every known position in an order that allows you to see immediately
all the moves known from and to a position, the number of games containing that
position, and the percentages showing the results of the games with the position. For
opening preparation the advantages of this tool cannot be emphasized enough. For example,
if a move you are considering is not in the tree, then you immediately know it is a
theoretical novelty. In order for all this to be of practical use, the Chess Assistant
team has worked hard over time to reduce the size of the tree itself (the space it
occupies in your HD) and the time required to build it.
Chess Assistant Light has two different trees for a base: Direct Tree and CA
Proffesional Tree (Chess Assistant 6.1 complete version has also got the third CA Tree):
Direct Tree – This tree is the fastest to navigate
through and allows you to get the information instantly from any position. The Direct Tree
can serve as an actual object and be removed from the base where it was built to be
accessed anywhere (such as from a CD). There are many options to allow you to reduce the
size of the tree (and the time to build it, of course), such as including only those
positions that occurred at least twice, and then adding a game continuation as a note.
This allowed us to build a Direct Tree for the Base2001 (500,000 games) that takes up
only 127 Mb and that is included on the CD. In Chess Assistant 6 you can also build Direct
Trees for a dataset, and enjoy other options such as choosing annotations to be included
as positions in the tree or as pop-up commentary.
CA Professional Tree – This is the big brother to the
CA Tree above, and is the largest and fastest tree you can build for a base. It is a
complete position-based tree like the Direct Tree, though inseparable from the base, and
allows you to access instantly all the information from any position. Please note that the
tree includes not only opening moves but also every position from every game with all the
statistics. Although it’s true that it takes longer to build, and takes up considerably
more space, it won’t take your computer days to create, nor will it require a separate
HD to store. For the Base2001 (1,553,161 games – updated until April 15th) this equated
to 1.53 Gb (193 Mb for the base and 1.33 Gb for the tree). On an Athlon 1 Ghz with 256 Mb
Ram, it took 52 minutes 48 seconds to build.
CAP is a special project created and run by Dann Corbit, with strong support of
Convekta, and stands for Chess Analysis Project. It is a project designed to have a
computer program analyze positions for several minutes and collect all the results into a
single base.Vast majority of these positions are from openings, so when you see opening
moves displayed in the tree with 0 games and an evaluation in the CAP column, these are
the alternate suggestions made by programs, but that have yet to be tested in a game.
Chess Openings 2001 comes with a total of 7 million positions in the CAP tree of which
more than 4.5 million are opening positions.
If you work directly with the tree window, then you can also directly edit the tree,
include your own annotations (variations and commentary) and evaluations, not to mention
running the engine, of course. It is here that you'll see an additional possibility of not
only the known moves from the position but also the moves that lead to the position. You
can call up a small window to see the different paths that lead up to it, so that you can
not only see the last few moves that lead to the position but the entire line. If this is
new for you, you'd better stock up on aspiring as you're getting ready to discover the
world of transpositions as only Chess Assistant Light can show you.
For example, we are often told that a position such as below one, with the classic
isolated d-pawn, can occur from many different move orders and it is often used as an
example of the flexibility of openings.
With Chess Assistant Light you cannot only quantify exactly how many ‘many’ is, but
also see what every one of those other lines are in a small pop-up window. You can then
click on the moves in it and see how those move orders ended up transposing to the
position on the board. As you can see the screenshot below, according to the Base2001 (500,000
games) the position above has arisen from 63 different move orders, of which 25 were in 8
moves, and 38 were in 7 moves.
Since you can now build a quick direct tree for a set of games, you will also find a
whole new world of opening preparation available as you watch not only the moves your
opponent prefers in the tree made from his games, but also see the results/statistics from
the other trees either by using the drop down menu at the top to flip from tree to tree,
or by using the convenient shortcuts created to accelerate your work ([Shift] – [F1];
[Shift] – [F2]; [Shift] – [F3]).
8. Folders/classifiers and Classes
9. Printing and Exporting
10. Statistics
11. Fonts, colors, pieces, backgrounds and DGT board
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