I have been using chess software for playing and for game management for a long time and I have always especially liked the HIARCS chess engine. I was excited when HIARCS Chess Explorer (just HCE from here forward) was released and I quickly snapped up a copy. It has quickly become the main software package I use for almost all of my chess interests. It is not as comprehensive as some of the other solutions that are available but the philosophy behind HCE seems to be "do the important things and do them well".
HCE is a relatively new application, though the HIARCS chess engine has been around for over 20 years. It is primarily a database management system for chess games, though it also provides an interface for playing chess as well. I will talk about these two main functions separately.
HCE provides decent facilities for creating, managing and exploring databases of chess games. Included is a modest though excellent set of databases that include a number of important games and training positions. Rather than include massive databases that provide an exhaustive collection of games, what is included is of high quality. One of the provided databases consists of a very good collection of annotated games with full evaluations and full commentary.
As should be expected, HCE offers full search capabilities for databases and makes navigation easy and straightforward. Games can be played back automatically or can be manually stepped through move-by-move. Adding new games to a database as well and adding new databases outright is also easy and is fairly self-explanatory.
One of the things I like to do with my games after I play them is to have a full engine analysis and then go through and manually add comments as I find things I feel need to be annotated beyond a move suggestion and numerical evaluation. HCE provides these functions through the menu system and makes fully commenting a game very easy and actually fun. Also available is the ability to analyze a game in interactive mode, implementing "infinite analysis" of a position simply by activating the chess playing engine while looking at the desired position in a game.
Of course, you can play chess through HCE as well and by default the opponent is HIARCS. If you have the Deep HIARCS version then that is available too but I have yet to figure out how to make it the default engine. With a minimum of effort you can add additional engines as well, as long as they use the Universal Chess Interface (UCI) protocol. If you have more than one engine loaded and connected, you can even set up engine matches between the available engines.
I did find an issue with loading up other engines. HCE does not provide a default opening book and many UCI engines do not know where to find their own opening books. As a result, engines set to play against HIARCS are at a distinct disadvantage and in blitz games may lose on time due to having to calculate opening moves instead of referencing a book. I have found a few engines that allow for pointing them to a book file, but these seem to be few and far between.
Of course, HCE comes with the HIARCS engine, and the Deep version includes Deep HAIRCS, the multiprocessor version. HIARCS is the single most human-like engine available. Against other engines, when playing at reduced strength I have noticed that said other engines play strange moves such as shuffling rooks back and forth. So, reduced strength comes through wasting time and making dubious and obviously computer-like moves. HIARCS comes with more smarts than that and makes very human-like mistakes. This is the sparring partner you want.
What is not included that can be found in a lot of other chess tools is an integrated online playing client such as for the ICC. Something like this is certainly not necessary, but it's absence is noticed when you're used to having such available. Also not available is the capability to connect to chess engines other than UCI-compliant engines. There are still some good engines that use the Winboard protocol (Crafty comes to mind) but this number is dwindling; still, it would be nice to have the ability to use these engines with HCE.
Overall, HIARCS Chess Explorer is a fine chess database and game playing application that for such a new program has a lot of polish and brings a lot of features to the table. It does not implement everything that some of the older applications have, such as an online playing client, but it has all of the main functions a player needs. It has taken over as my main chess game management application, and I heartily recommend it to anyone looking for a way to organize their own game collections and who want a good sparring partner that plays like a human.
samuel manzano
Matt Morgan