| Developer(s) | Richard Lang, Adrian Millett |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 7.2 |
| Operating system | Windows |
| Type | Chess engine |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | www.chessgenius.com |
ChessGenius is the name given to a chess playing computer program written by Richard Lang who has in the past written programs that have won the Computer World Chess Championship on 10 occasions.[1]
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ChessGenius is a continuation of a series of programs (which included various incarnations of the Mephisto program[2]) written by Richard Lang which won the World Microcomputer Chess Championship in 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991 and 1993.[3] ChessGenius was the first computer to beat a world champion (Garry Kasparov) at a non-blitz time limit.[4][5]
| Release Name | Year | OS |
| ChessGenius 1 | 1992[2] | MS-DOS |
| ChessGenius 2 | 1993[3] | MS-DOS |
| ChessGenius 3 | 1994[1] | MS-DOS |
| ChessGenius 4 | 1995[2] | Windows |
| ChessGenius 5 | 1996[2] | Windows |
| ChessGenius 6 | 1998[2] | Windows |
| ChessGenius Classic (7.2) | 2002[2] | Windows |
As well as playing chess, ChessGenius can read games created in .cbf (Chess Base Format) and .pgn (Portable Game Notation) formats and can analyse games assessing the moves played against its own evaluations.[6] It is also possible to run other chess engines in the ChessGenius interface.[7]
In the early 1990s ChessGenius was "one of the first master-strength programs".[8] At the Intel World Chess Grand Prix in London in 1994 ChessGenius achieved a rating performance for the tournament of 2795 Elo.[9][10] From 1994 until 1998 ChessGenius remained one of the top chess programs available.[11] In 1999 ChessGenius dropped out of the top ten on the SSDF (Swedish Chess Computer Association) rating list[12] and it continued to slip down the list over the following decade.[13] The programmer Richard Lang has suggested that this was because the program does not scale well to faster hardware.[2] Portable versions (for example for Palm and the iPhone) perform well because ChessGenius is particularly strong in rather weak hardware environments.[2][8][14] Unlike most other commercial vendors, Richard Lang explicitly forbids including ChessGenius in chess engine rating lists, so it is difficult to gauge its strength compared to modern programs.
As well as PC versions of ChessGenius there are versions available for various mobile devices including mobile phones and personal organisers.[10][15]