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Subject: Chessmaster 8000 FAQ

Author: John Merlino

Date: 12:56:42 07/19/00


First of all, I must state FOR THE RECORD that nothing contained herein is
absolutely guaranteed to be true. Chessmaster 8000 has just gone into Alpha
earlier this week, and still has about 3 months of development/testing time
before it is shipped. So anything could happen to make something that I say
below turn out to be inaccurate or otherwise untrue. So, don't say you
weren't warned, and don't get your hopes up too high if you see something
here that really makes you happy and then it doesn't show up in the final
product.

This first section contains answers regarding all of the questions (in no
particular order) that I got from users of this forum:
------------
Q: Is there going to be a major improvement in Chessmaster's opening book?
There was only 40,000+ positions on 7000 and the lines were bad.
A: At this time, Chessmaster's opening book that is shipping with CM8000 (as
well as all the other books that other personalities use) is identical to the
one that shipped with CM7000, although it is still possible that a new book for
Chessmaster will magically appear.
------------
Q: How strong will Chessmaster 8000 perform, and what will be the cost when it
is released?
A: It is believed that the new King engine is stronger, although Johan's
favorite saying is "time will tell". So far, the development team has only
performed very limited testing of the new engine against the old one.
The cost will be typical of initial releases of Chessmaster, about $40.
------------
Q: Can the developers create a way to seperate the personality's ratings into 3
categories (Standard, blitz and lightning)?
A: Yes, they can. But that is not planned for this version since it involves an
unworkable amount of testing time. It requires an immense amount of resources
just to get reasonable ratings at one category, given that there are over 160
personalities in the game. See below on the recalibration of the personality
ratings....
------------
Q: Can there be other ways to setup certain personalities?
On 7000 and 6000, I've seen Attack/Defend, Material/Position, Control of
Center, Mobility, King Safety, Passed Pawns, and Pawn Weaknesses.  Also the
Seirawan personality had a very low King Safety level.   Can you add some
other options like, Tactics, Attacking the King, Safe/Risky play, And certain
Strategies on openings.  And how sensitive will the changes be? (example:
Control of Center changed from 100 to 110).
A: Right now, there is only one new personality setting planned: hash table
size. Yes, hash table size will be changeable within the GUI, but it will NOT be
a global setting. If you want to change Chessmaster's default hash table size,
you will have to create a new personality that uses a different size. On the
other hand, you can switch between hash table sizes quickly within the GUI now,
without having to quit, modify the INI file, and restart like you did before.
And you will even be able to test one hash table size against another on the
same machine. The possible settings for sizes (apart from none) start at 512KB
and double (1MB, 2MB, 4MB...) all the way up to 256MB, although you will not be
able to set a value larger than your machine's total physical memory MINUS 32MB
(due to Windows and Chessmaster memory usage).
There were several other possibilities for new settings that were discussed but
fell by the wayside: mirrors of the King Safety, Mobility, Control of Center,
Passed Pawns and Pawn Weakness settings much like there are mirrors of the piece
value settings (i.e. I care about MY King Safety with THIS value and I care
about my OPPONENT'S King Safety with a DIFFERENT value).
There also was discussed the possibility of splitting up the Pawn Weakness
setting into several sub-settings (central pawns, rook pawns, etc.).
Another possible setting was "Time Awareness", which might allow some weaker
personalities to get into time trouble earlier in the game (although some of
them do it already).
------------
Q: There was no endgame tablebase on the previous Chessmaster versions.  Is
there going to be any on Chessmaster 8000? If not, Can you improve endgame play?
A: There are no plans to include endgame tablebases at this time, although it
might get dropped in at the last minute or in a subsequent patch. Therefore, if
the endgame play is improved, it is likely to be only found in the engine.
------------
Q: Some personalities (1500-2000) find mates in positions no human would
possibly see quickly. I would like for those personalities to have their mate
search reduced and the even weaker ones to play like weak humans (fewer
sacrifices, and piece hanging).
A: So would the development team. Actually it's possible for personalities rated
below 1000 to see mates in 7 or more! They're looking into it with Johan, but it
would probably involve more work than the team is willing to make at this time.
------------
Q: I'd like to add (although it surely has been noted before), that CM8000
should have a *hash table size setting* again, preferably in the menu.
A: See above on new personality settings....
------------
Q: I'd like to know whether there will be auto232 support.
A: It keeps getting pushed to the back burner. Doubtful for this version,
although it MAY be possible that you will be able to connect on any internet
connection with a computer personality, meaning that you can have two computer
personalities play each other over the net (TCP/IP, LAN, modem and the dreaded
MPlayer). Auto232 is still not out of the question at this time, however.
---------------
Q: I would not be surprised if since the takeover from Mattel that there is not
a Barbie personality thrown in there somewhere.
A: It will not happen, mostly because Mattel is attempting to sell Mattel
Interactive (formerly The Learning Company, who bought Mindscape, who were
originally called The Software Toolworks, who were the original makers of
Chessmaster -- <sigh>). If it came right down to it, I suspect the development
team would agree to do it, and then "forget" at the last minute.
---------------
Q: One thing I would like is more attractive women personalities to play
against. There are some pretty Ugly dudes and dudettes in that program. I want
to play against some models. They are always going on about how they have
brains, well lets see some of them.
A: Well, the personality faces are going to be in 16-bit this time. Does that
count? Besides, ugly is in the eye of the beholder.
---------------
Q: Forget trying to make the program run using drivers like directX and at least
get the program nice and stable to most systems.
A: DirectX is required for TCP/IP, LAN and modem play. That is all that it is
used for. Audio requires MP3 support, and the program cannot initialize if the
MP3 driver is being used by another program (such as WinAmp). The development
team is looking into a global "No Sound" option.
---------------
Q: I think they would have realised by now that CM7K with no new engine did not
create the buzz like the other versions. There was very little positive
comments, even though there were some, but not much.
A: Most comments WERE positive, but not as glowing as with previous versions.
There never was a score below 80% in any magazine or online review that I saw.
Sales were brisk as always.
---------------

And now for the general "spoiler" list covering things that were not
specifically asked about:

-- As stated above, there is a new King engine, based on The King 3.0 (final
version number still TBD).

-- The BIG news (at least for people on this forum) is XBoard support. Yes, you
will be able to make "personalities" out of any XBoard engine! You just specify
the engine executable name and path, and any command line parameters, and you
can have Crafty (for example) playing Chessmaster within the Chessmaster
interface. And, yes, this does mean that the new Chessmaster engine is going to
be an XBoard engine as well. BUT, you will NOT be able to use this engine
outside of Chessmaster (in Winboard, for example), due to the security that has
been written into both the engine and the GUI.
HOWEVER, Chessmaster is NOT being written with the intent of being a
full-featured Winboard interface. You will be able to see thinking/pondering
output from the engines (see next item), but that's about it other than the
standard Chessmaster features.
There will, though, be a special "debug window", where you can see ALL of the
output of ANY engine (including The King). This window will only be accessible
via an undocumented INI file setting, so I'll keep you all informed.

-- Thinking/Pondering output will be available, just like it always was, via the
"Thinking Lines" window (although the output format will be slightly modified
from the old style due to the pondering format that XBoard engines use).
However, you will now be able to see output for both White AND Black at the same
time, AND (drum roll please....) there will be a third sub-window for infinite
analysis from the Chessmaster personality (which will be available only if
Chessmaster isn't already playing in the game). So, theoretically, you'll be
able to have three engines sending pondering output at the same time. You will
be able to turn the output from any of these windows on or off at any time. The
third window will also be available for human vs. human games,
providing the infinite analysis that everybody has wanted for many years.

-- The ratings for the personalities are being completely recalculated based on
the extensive Engine Test that was mailed out to over 100 USCF rated players.
These testers were rated from below 600 to almost 2400, and the average rating
for the testers is probably going to be around 1500, although I do not have
final numbers yet. Each tester played 30 games (6 games against 5 different
opponents, 3 each as White and Black) at a time control of Fischer 5/10. I know
that there are at least 2500 games in the development team's database so far, so
that's over 80 testers who have returned their games.
Against 10 testers rated above 2000 (60 total games against an average rating of
2153), the Chessmaster personality is +57 =1 -2.
The development team has told me that this has been a fascinating exercise, as
some personalities that had a rating of N when playing only against other
personalities have ratings of over (N-300) when playing against humans. They
believe the new ratings for the personalities will be much more accurate this
time around.

-- Chessmaster 8000 will ALMOST CERTAINLY (I'd give it a 97% chance) support
Windows 2000 and Windows NT. One of the developers is running on Windows 2000,
one has NT 4.0 on one of his two machines, and the rest are running Win98. The
internal Beta testers are planning on testing on Win98 and Win2K (I don't know
about NT). However, there is a big difference between SUPPORT and OFFICIAL
COMPLIANCE (the latter requiring much more testing and approval by Microsoft),
so, while there SHOULD be no problems....

-- The minimum spec machine is going to be a P2-233 with 32MB of RAM (48MB of
RAM recommended). The new King engine is being conservatively rated at 2724 USCF
for that processor, based on the SSDF's rating of 2574 for Chessmaster 6000 on a
Pentium 200, plus the standard 150 points for converting to USCF.

-- The only new item that might cause people discomfort is that Chessmaster 8000
is going to require at least a 16-bit video mode. Users that are running Windows
in an 8-bit mode, are going be to directed to their Video Properties dialog,
where they can adjust to the required setting if they like. The main reason for
this is that the personality faces (among other aspects of the GUI) were not
terribly attractive in a 256-color (actually, only 236 because Windows takes 20
palette entries) "global" palette that had to try to make everything look good.
I realize that most people here couldn't care less, but, to be
blunt, you guys aren't the target audience. ;-)

-- IM Josh Waitzkin's contribution is an audio-annotated intermediate/advanced
endgame tutorial, covering 15 different games in the following categories: King
and Pawn (3 games and one general tutorial covering opposition and such),
Bishops of Same Color (3 games), Bishop vs Knight (2 games), Bishop and Knight
vs Rook (1 game), Bishops of Opposite Color (2 games), and Rook and Pawn (3
games).

-- Bruce Pandolfini's contribution is a brand new version of "Rate My Play", in
which the user can try to guess the moves of Grandmasters such as Kramnik,
Botvinnik and Alekhine in 10 different games. The new feature is being called
"Match the Masters".

-- Larry Evans once again is providing 100 new annotated Classic Games, ranging
from the early 1800's all the way up to a few games from 2000.

-- The Database is getting its customary update, but it also being pruned a bit
as well. Of the 500,000 or so games from CM7000, it was determined that about 7%
of them were "uninteresting or useless". They were removed from the database due
to size limitations before creating the new version, which added about the same
number of games that were removed, and many of the new games are from 1999-2000.
The database interface remains unchanged from CM7000.

-- There will be new exercises similar to those found on ICC, in which you try
to mate with a given set of pieces: KQvK, KRvK, KQvKN, KRvKN and KQvKR are the
ones planned at this time. However, unlike on ICC, you will not be told how many
moves it (ideally) is to mate, since endgame tablebases are not being supported
at this time.

-- The blueish tiled and mottled backgrounds from CM7000 (that more than a few
people didn't like) are now optional. You can either choose ANY bitmap to be
tiled for any room, OR you can use the new gradient option, where the background
is a nice smooth transition from one color at the top to a different color (or
the same color, if you want a flat colored background) at the bottom.

-- Blindfold chess is back. If any human player has chosen to be playing
blindfolded, then ALL pieces are invisible at all times. Obviously, the computer
cannot play blindfolded.

-- There is now a way to do a simple text search in the Classic Games content
and the list of openings in the Practice Openings dialog. The Classic Games can
be searched by player, year, event and location. And the openings can be
searched with any string (such as "Knight" or "Gambit").

-- Of course, there will be a few new piece sets and boards that I'm sure all of
you will detest ;-). Also, many of the old pseudo-3D sets and boards (some from
as long ago as CM4000 and quite unattractive now) have finally been removed.

-- It is POSSIBLE that Swiss tournaments are going to be supported. This has yet
to be determined and I'd give it a 2/3 chance.

Well, that's about it. Chessmaster 8000 is due to hit the shelves in early
November. If you have any more questions, please don't hesitate to ask and I'll
see what I can dig up for you.

jm



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