Author: Karsten Bauermeister
Date: 17:11:51 04/13/98
Go up one level in this thread
Hi Marc (Loftus), unfortunatelay I have no tournament results of Chess Challenger (1). In fact this model was the first serial chess computer ever made. Some time before (in August 1976) the very first chess computer was presented at the toys-fair at New York! This model was built by a american firm named "Mostek". But this computer never came on the market (perhaps it was just a dummy?!), so the real first one was the chess challenger. Should I mistake in this thing, it would be very interesting for me! It was only sold on the american market and therefore it never played in any European tournament. Because I live in Germany, I don't know, if there were any results in other countries. After about 1.000 pieces it was replaced by the Chess Challenger 3. This name was offical, because of its three playing levels. First computers played in tournaments in Germany (perhaps in Europe) were the Challenger 10-models of autumn 1978 against Compuchess and Boris. Before that there were no computer opponents and no weak enough human ones!? Playing against it was not easy, because rows and lines were confused! So you had to type in 5d5e for example for the first move (e2e4)! You see, this one was really a toy, not a serious chess computer. More the computer didn't know en passant, so it was very difficult to play chess with it. Because of its search depth about only one single ply, I would estimate his strength of about 1000 elo. Something I would call: "A player, who knows someone, who knows the rules!" I can't agree to that, what Marc Young said. My model (I am still a proud owner of one Chess Challenger 1!) could set mate (but I will examine this in the next days): One really impressive (and shortest!)Mate is the following: 1.Ng1-g5 ??!! e7e5 2.Qd1xf7 MATE! As you can see, another problem with the first chess challenger was, it didn't control human input! Karsten
This page took 0.01 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.