Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 06:51:23 02/24/98
Go up one level in this thread
On February 24, 1998 at 09:14:40, Steven Schwartz wrote: >On February 24, 1998 at 02:12:29, Keith Ian Price wrote: > >>On February 23, 1998 at 17:15:36, Stuart Cracraft wrote: >> >>>Whew! Sounds like a legal quagmire if I ever heard of one. >>> >>>Fortunately there is a new piece-recognition style board out for >>>or from the Fritz machine people that should be interfacable to others. >>>Unlike the Novag universal board which I believe does not have piece >>>recognition. > >> >>As far as I know, you can buy the Smartboard from Bert of Gambitsoft. He >>will pay the shipping from Germany. You will need to buy an inductor to >>raise the voltage to 220V. He was making noises about not selling it >>anymore, but probably could be persuaded to sell one. >> >>kp > >Two points: > a) The only advantage to piece-recognition is for those >who often set up problems on their computer. However, boards >without the technology allow problems to be set up with the >extra step of having to inform the computer which piece is which. >The two disadvantages, historically, of piece recognition have >been a higher degree of failure and a higher expense. > b) ICD/Your Move sold more Smartbords, by far, than any other >company in the U.S., and our decision to stop selling the boards >was financially painful. However, it was the right thing to do >and no amount of persuasion would convince us to chnge that >policy. After all, it is nice to make the profit that the Smartboard >allowed but a bummer to know that three times that much could be >taken away (not to mention lawyer's fees) if we continued to sell >them. >-Steve There's another advantage. The one I ended up using with Cray Blitz was based on reed switches. In blitz games, where I found this board to be at least a 100 rating point advantage, these switches had drawbacks: 1. pieces have to be reasonably close to the center of the square, or, as I did, you end up using multiple reed switches per square (I used 4, which made this fairly expensive.) 2. in blitz games, it is not uncommon for the opponent to bump several pieces in a time scramble. This confuses things because in a capture, only one square changes. And identifying the target can be hard if multiple pieces are knocked over and set back up in random order. RF piece recognition doesn't fail when a bunch of pieces are knocked over.
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.