Author: Richard A. Fowell (fowell@netcom.com)
Date: 15:17:15 09/27/98
Three PC programs offered graphical display of chess variation
trees over the last 12 months. (URLs below).
Surely this isn't new? Can anyone cite any pre-1995 examples,
other than the Macintosh program, SmartChess?
By graphical display, I'm not talking about simply positioning the movetext
vertically (like ECO/MCO) or horizontally (like Chessbase?) to indicate
variations. I want to see lines on the screen, and preferably the user
could display the position at a node, and perhaps comments, by clicking
on it, and hopefully add/delete variations at that point.
Since chess variations are traditionally thought of as a tree
(especially in computer chess), and many papers on computer display
of trees were published by 1981, and animated tree display of
algorithm execution was published by 1992, one might think this
would have been old hat by now.
The only pre-1995 example I can find, however, is SmartChess on
the Macintosh. My Sept 16, 1994 demo copy of SmartChess 4.2
has so many features for tree entry/modification/display/saving,
that I expect early versions had at least some of these capabilities.
So - where was everyone else?
Richard A. Fowell (fowell@netcom.com)
Background material below:
* PC software for graphical tree display:
- Chess Tree: http://www.shensoft.com/chestree.htm
- Chess Map: http://www.chessmaps.com/
- Extreme Chess 98: http://www.allaboutgames.com/powerchess98
* Features of SmartChess Reader, as of Sept. 16, 1994.
- manual addition, deletion, annotation and rearrangement of nodes
- created trees by file import or manual creation
- Tree displayed as horizontal forking lines, with eight levels of zoom.
If "information" was selected information shown was:
- Max zoom: none
- Level 1-4 : none
- Level 5 : box with long algebraic at each node
- Level 6 : box with white/black circle at each node,
or boxed comment text for that node, if any.
- Level 7 : really small diagram at each node
- Level 8 : small diagram at each node.
- file import of PGN with recursive annotations
- bulk import of PGN files, and user-commanded merger to form trees
- tree window can be: scrolled, zoomed (8 levels), resized, moved
- view board position at any node by clicking on the node
(which also displays text comments, graphic annotations)
- tree display a function of zoom: bare lines, long algebraic, black/white
nodes with text box annotation display, small diagrams, larger diagrams.
- import formats supported: PGN, Chessbase, NICBase, Text, SmartChess, 4m
- manual annotation of diagrams with text, arrows, square markers
... and much more. A current SmartChess demo (v4.4) is at
http://nobi.ethz.ch/febi/smart_chess/smart_chess.html
as well as a URL where you can buy the version that can save data.
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.