Author: John Merlino
Date: 14:19:44 09/06/00
Below is an updating of my FAQ that I posted here about two months ago. Now that Chessmaster 8000 is officially in Beta, many things are much more "nailed down", so I figured that an update would be useful. Everything that has required an update since my last post is surrounded by "<<" and ">>" blocks. Everything that is NOT surrounded by these characters is from the original FAQ and remains unchanged. So, if you are familiar with the previous FAQ, just look for the new stuff. COMPLETELY new items are at the end of the list. ----------------------------------------------- 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 << Beta >> earlier this week, and still has << less than 6 weeks >> of development and testing time before it is shipped. << Chessmaster 8000 should be on the shelves in early November. >> 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, the opening book that is shipping with CM8000 is identical to the ones that shipped with CM7000, although it is still possible that a new book will magically appear. << It is also possible that some VERY minor modifications may occur to the CM7000 book in making the new CM8000 book. It is now also somewhat likely that there will be a new class of opening books that are specific to a given opening, such as Sicilian.OBK and King's Indian.OBK, since many users have requested them. The number of these books depends on the amount of space that is available on the CDs (which were pretty full in CM7000), but there may be as many as 50 (or more) books that are strictly dedicated to a certain opening. >> ------------ Q: How strong will Chessmaster 8000 perform, when it will be released, 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 previous versions 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). << Johan's engine supports table sizes up to 2GB. >> 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. << It is now SOMEWHAT likely that Nalimov's tablebases are going to be supported in a patch (doubtful that the program will ship with support for them given the current time frame and the testing needed). If so, then it would be an option that will be personality-specific, like hash tables. I give it about a 1/4 chance. Stay tuned.... >> ------------ 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. << The development team has commented: "Just think how bad these personalities would be if they DIDN'T spot these mates! Don't put yourself in this position!" Easier said than done for me.... >> ------------ 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. Very 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 ENTIRELY 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. << At least QuickTime is no longer required.... ;-) >> --------------- 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). << As of now, the version number of the engine is 3.11 and is dated August 18th, 2000, but the development team is expecting one more (and probably final) version in a few days. >> -- 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" (final name yet to be determined), where you can see ALL of the output of ANY engine (including The King). This window might only be accessible via an undocumented INI file setting, so I'll keep you all informed if that ends up being the case. >> -- 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 about 110 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. << The final tally of testers who returned their results was 95, but one was still provisionally rated, so only 94 test results were used. The average rating of the players was approximately 1520. Many of the mid-range to low-range personalities (in terms of rating) look like their ratings are going to be adjusted fairly drastically. Ex: Lacey (a bane among humans), previously rated around 1500, is being lowered to approximately 1350. Some are being adjusted over 200 points, and almost all of the major changes are going to result in LOWERING of ratings, as expected. >> -- 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.... << It now appears that testing on Win2K will be minimal, since the program will not OFFICIALLY support Win2K or NT. However, the development team still stands by their claim that it will "work fine" on these two platforms. >> -- 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 course, 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. << The current (and probably final) count of games in the database is just over 506,000, about 6,000 more games than in CM7000's database. BUT, about 35,000 of those games are completely new, since many other "useless" games were removed from the CM7000 database. >> -- 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) 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. << Swiss tournaments are in!! You can have between 6 and 32 players, and between 3 and N-3 rounds, where N is the number of players in the tournament. >> << -- Any previous mention I may have made about voice recognition is now moot. The feature is dead, at least for this version. -- Advice for each move is now "persistent". The Advice window, will retain the advice text for each move throughout a game, so you can go back to a move where you got advice and see the advice without having to ask for it again. Of course, you can overwrite the advice by asking for advice again. -- Unfortunately, due to the powers that be at Mattel Interactive, CD 1 MIGHT be required EVERY TIME you start up the program, rather than the "CD Refresh" feature that was present in CM7000 and before. This is because it has been mandated that all new products use a copy protection scheme called SafeDisc. The development team is trying to get around it, but this year they just might not be able to get it under the radar. >> Well, that's about it. 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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