Deep Position Analysis with Fritz

       Having done a post on Aquarium’s IDeA feature I thought a comparison with a similar one offered by Fritz…Deep Position Analysis…was in order.
        I love this feature on Fritz.  Unlike Aquarium though, you need to save the analysis before quitting because it does not store the analysis in a file.  If you want to go back and analyze some more, you have to start from scratch.  Also, it’s been a couple of days now that I have been fiddling around with IDeA on Aquarium and it still isn’t very clear to me how to make it work smoothly and understand what all the icons and such appearing in the various windows mean. It also annoys me that when IDeA is running, I don't see anything happening.  I want to see some lines of analysis and evaluations flickering on the screen just to reassure me it's doing something.  Trivial, I know.  For me, Fritz is definitely more user friendly.
        The way DPA works is, it advances one move at a time, each time adding the top-evaluated candidate to a growing line of analysis so that eventually you end up with a whole tree of moves. As with Aquarium, you can have more than one engine perform a deep position analysis but, of course, with more than one engine, be prepared to allow it lots of time.
        Even using a fairly fast time setting (say one minute per move) and a fairly small tree (say four moves) DPA can take maybe two hours, so it’s clear that really ‘deep’ analysis could easily take overnight.  And, as mentioned, once you stop the analysis, that’s it. 
        For ease of use, I think Fritz is far and away the winner, but for thoroughness, Aquarium’s IdeA feature might be better.  I say ‘might’ because I'm not sure yet.  That's because of of its whopping big learning curve for those who, like me, are computer handicapped, rather dense when it comes to understanding a manual or maybe just a slow learner…on the other hand if you are ten years old or a computer guru you can probably pick it up on the fly.