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The first time I saw a computer playing chess, I was amazed. My parents were visiting some friends, and one of them was in the middle of a game against one of the early consumer electronic games. His being in the middle of a game didn’t really distract him from our visit – the computer took over 10 hours per move!<\/p>\n
Years later, my mother bought one in Hong Kong. With about 20 buttons and a 5-character LCD display, it wasn’t bad at first. However, over time, it started to get a little senile. It stopped conceding defeat when it was checkmated. Later, it stopped really paying any attention to your moves. It finally had its life support removed after my most memorable – and novel – opening gambit. My opening move was to move my Queen’s pawn forward seven<\/em> spaces – taking the black King. The computer considered this rather aggressive, and I thought, unanswerable move for a few seconds, before responding by moving one of its pawns forward two spaces.<\/p>\n My uncle bought a much more up-market model. Shaped like a thick chess board, it had pressure sensors under each position, and red LED to indicate the move it wanted. What’s more, it spoke! A pre-recorded voice would say “Queen takes pawn!” and confusingly “Clarify pawn!” when you hit the wrong button. The technology had clearly improved, because when it<\/em> got older, it got crabbier. It would get confused and randomly shout “Illegal move!” at inappropriate moments. When it got to the stage where you could ask it for a hint, and it would both recommend and<\/em> disallow the same move, it was time to move on.<\/p>\n The Commodore 64 provided a more general-purpose platform for chess games. <\/p>\n The canonical Grandmaster Chess would lock up after a couple of moves on my machine – with just the timer ticking over – claiming the computer was still thinking, and fooling me for hours.<\/p>\n The developers of another Commodore 64 masterpiece saved themselves hours of effort by not bothering to validate the human’s moves. Perhaps other humans were trustworthy, but I had fun using my King to take all of my<\/em> pieces, and then all of the computers pieces, one-by-one, until I picked off the computer’s King, and it conceded.<\/p>\n Still, if you were willing to play fair, it would play fair too – unless, of course, you “castled”. To my horror, the first time I castled, the computer moved<\/em> my rook, but copied<\/em> my King. Left with two different Kings on the board to defend, I soon conceded this challenge as too much for me.<\/p>\n But soon it was 1989 and there was a huge leap in the state-of-the-art in computer chess. Battle Chess<\/a> on a 4.77 MHz PC XT left the others behind. Battle Chess had a gimmick – a 3D board, with hilarious animations of pieces moving and being taken.<\/p>\n Battle Chess posed an interesting chess puzzle: produce a board arrangement where it is white to move, and white can choose any of six different moves to mate-in-1, where each of the moves uses a different type of piece. One you have found that, you can watch each of the different checkmate animations in Battle Chess at your leisure.<\/p>\n My father wasn’t interested in gimmicks – he wanted a simple chess game, and that’s where Battle Chess fell down. Oh sure, it had a simple 2D mode. However, it chose the slightly unconventional colours of red against blue. On my monochrome Hercules graphics card<\/a>, that was rendered as mid-amber versus mid-amber!<\/p>\n