Before going into what has changed, I would first like to say thank you to everybody who has helped with LINEACHESS: testing versions, finding bugs, trying the analysis, discussing ideas, providing test material and simply giving honest feedback.
A lot of what is now in the program came from those discussions. Some things worked immediately, others needed several attempts, and quite a few features changed considerably after people actually started using them.
Version 4.8 has become a fairly large update. LINEACHESS can still be used as a normal chess program, of course, but the analysis, database and training parts have grown to the point where the program has become something rather different from where it started.
The biggest addition: Training
There is now a separate Training menu.
It contains 6,660 tactical puzzles in three collections. The approach is deliberately forgiving: a wrong move does not end the puzzle. The piece goes back and you can try again, while the available score drops from 100% to 60%, 30% and finally 10%.
There is an optional timer, the solution can always be shown, and LINEACHESS remembers the current puzzle and running average when the program is closed. There is also Check my move. If the puzzle collection rejects a move but you believe your alternative also works, the engine can check it. If the move is good enough, it is accepted.
Own PGN puzzle collections can be imported as well.
Test yourself
The second part of Training is something quite different.
Test yourself contains 40 historical games from seven schools/periods of chess and 1,595 test positions. Every legal move in those positions has already been analysed and given a score. You simply choose the move you would play.
The game then continues with the move that was actually played historically, regardless of your choice. This means everybody goes through exactly the same positions and the results remain comparable. At the end you receive a rating on the same scale used by the LINEACHESS Game Strength Rating.
The methodology and test data come from Nick Milicev (SpaciousMind), and the test has been used over many years to measure more than 50 chess computers. Many thanks to Nick for making this work and the underlying data available. Without it, this part of LINEACHESS simply would not exist in its present form.
Opening reference
The opening section has also grown considerably.
LINEACHESS 4.8 contains 4,108 named opening lines covering all 500 ECO codes, together with statistics calculated from 95,341 master games up to move 12.
The program shows not only which moves were played and how frequently, but also how they scored.
Positions are matched by the actual board position, so transpositions are recognised automatically.
Any opening line can be put on the board and continued against an engine using Practise against engine. The same opening information and statistics also appear in the Book panel during a normal game.
Game Strength Rating
The original analysis idea remains at the centre of LINEACHESS.
Instead of only showing the engine evaluation of a position, LINEACHESS tries to measure the quality of the chess played over an entire game.
It produces separate figures for:
Opening Knowledge · Middle Game · End Game · Analytical Skills · Final Strength
Moves are classified as:
Best · Intriguing · Shaky · Fumble · Bad · Very Bad
Results can also be accumulated across several games of the same player, making it possible to see how the different parts of someone's game develop over time.
Arena analysis logs can now be imported directly, and the analysis board allows alternative moves to be explored with the live engine.
PGN, database and notation
A lot of work in 4.8 went into less visible things that nevertheless matter when using the program regularly.
Multi-game PGNs now work properly. A file containing hundreds of games opens with a filterable game picker, and you can move forward and backward through the collection.
Variations, comments, NAGs, arrows and coloured squares now survive the complete load/edit/save cycle.
Engine lines can also be inserted as real PGN variations without damaging the original game:
1.e4 (1.d4 d5 2.c4) e6
This fixes one of the more unpleasant bugs in earlier versions, where exploring an engine move could truncate the loaded game.
The notation itself has also been redesigned to look more like printed chess notation. Longer comments appear as separate indented paragraphs, and figurine notation is now available.
There is also a new Classic colour scheme alongside Light and Dark.
The rest is still there
LINEACHESS remains a normal chess program as well:
- human vs engine
engine vs engine
round-robin tournaments
adjustable playing strength
opening book and ECO classification
local SQLite games databases
database merge and duplicate detection
position search and CSV export
Stockfish 17.1 and the LINEACHESS engine
support for additional UCI engines
15 interface languages
Where we are now
When I started working on LINEACHESS, I certainly did not expect it to grow into all of this.
The current version contains 6,660 tactical puzzles, 1,595 scored test positions, 4,108 opening lines and opening statistics from 95,341 master games, on top of the playing, analysis and database functions.
More importantly, many of the ideas and improvements came from people actually using the program, questioning things and finding problems I would never have found alone.
So again, thank you to everyone who tested, discussed, criticised, contributed material or helped improve LINEACHESS along the way.
I hope you enjoy trying 4.8. And now let's see where the journey goes from here.
Best regards Arne