Chessmaster

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs to be updated.
Parts of this article or section have been identified as no longer being up to date.

Please update the article to reflect recent events, and remove this template when finished.

Chessmaster

Developer(s)	Ubisoft
Publisher(s)	Ubisoft, Feral Interactive (Mac)
Release date(s)	1988 - 2005
Genre(s)	Chess
Mode(s)	Single Player, Multiplayer
Platform(s)	MS Windows,MS-DOS

Chessmaster is a chess playing computer program, mentor and analyzer by Ubisoft. It includes different tutorials for players of all levels of the game.

The Chessmaster series started in 1986 with Chessmaster 2000 by The Software Toolworks. It was published for Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Macintosh, and DOS. In 1991, Chessmaster 3000 was published for Windows 3.x and in 1995 for PlayStation. The current version, Chessmaster 10th Edition, published in 2004, is only available for Microsoft Windows and Xbox.

The Chessmaster chess engine is called The King, written by Johan de Koning of the Netherlands. According to the July 2005 Swedish Chess Computer Association (SSDF) [1] rating list, Chessmaster 9000 has an estimated ELO rating of 2715 on an Athlon-1200 PC. If multiple versions of other engines are stripped out of the top list, Chessmaster 9000 ranks as the eleventh best chess engine in the world.

The King engine allows users to create new playing styles (also called "personalities") by manipulating several dozen different settings, such as King Safety, Pawn Weakness, Randomness, Mobility and others. Individual piece values can also be adjusted. Chessmaster 9000 comes with over 150 different personalities ranging from International Grandmaster strength down to Stanley, who is described as a monkey and plays what are essentially random moves.

The personality feature has inspired many amateur computer chess enthusiasts to attempt to find more optimum personalities. Notable among these are Kurt Utzinger [2], Wilhelm Hudetz, Jason Kent [3], Dom Leste, Milorad Madjar, Graham Banks and Ray Banks.

Chessmaster 9000

Chessmaster 9000 defeated then U.S. Chess Champion International Grandmaster Larry Christiansen in a four game match held in September 2002. Chessmaster won the match 2.5-1.5. The Chessmaster program was operated by John Merlino, the Project Manager of Chessmaster at the time of the match. Four different personalities were used in the match, the first three of which were based on famous human Grandmasters: Alexander Alekhine, Bobby Fischer and Mikhail Botvinnik. The final game of the match used the default "Chessmaster" personality. Christiansen won the first game, lost the second and third games, and the fourth game resulted in a draw.

Chessmaster 9000 also features exclusive courses by Josh Waitzkin, who also has multiple personalities embedded into the game.

[edit] Versions

To date, various versions of Chessmaster have appeared on Amiga, Apple II, Apple IIGS, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS, PC, Mac, Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo Game Boy, Nintendo Game Boy Color, Nintendo Game Boy Advance, Sega Game Gear, Sony PlayStation, Sony PlayStation 2, Microsoft Xbox, and mobile phones. The Mac version is ported by Feral Interactive, and the latest version available as of September 2006 is Chessmaster 10th Edition.

The first version to offer spoken moves and English advice in speech was Chessmaster 3000 MPC, by Mindscape, and included commentary by Anatoly Karpov.