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Subject: Re: New Chess computer

Author: Travers Waker

Date: 04:31:12 04/17/03

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>chess. You can learn a lot by having it autoplay weaker programs.  Fun,fun,fun.

Sad, sad, sad.

:-)

BTW, I also recommend a PDA instead of a stand-alone chess computer.  The
stand-alone is superior if you want to play blitz on a real board (if it's a
sensory one), but otherwise you can just make the moves on a real board while
playing the PDA.

I have Chess Tiger for Palm, running on a Palm Vx.  I'm very happy with it.  It
could do with some more ways of handicapping it (like being able to handicap it
in a 5min per side blitz game), but Christophe says this is not a priority for
him because not enough people have requested it.  I find this strange, but maybe
it's because most of the people who contact him are computer chess enthusiasts
and derive more pleasure from knowing they've got a strong chess-playing
computer in their pocket than from actually playing against it.  Christophe, if
you're reading this - please consider adding ways to allow users to handicap
Tiger at a particular time control, like 5min blitz.

I've actually figured out a way to achieve such handicapping on my Palm Vx: I
have Afterburner overclocking utility installed, but instead of overclocking the
CPU, I underclock it.  Tiger becomes a bit more like a domestic cat (albeit one
with a rather wild side) when run at 10MHz!

An interesting aside - my impression is that Chess Genius is stronger than Chess
Tiger when run at 10MHz, but weaker when run at 20MHz.  Maybe Genius's
move-ordering is better, or maybe something else?  Anyone care to speculate?

Anyway, if you're planning on getting a Palm (which means you are planning on
buying Chess Tiger and maybe Chess Genius), investigate whether the version of
PalmOS the Palm is using has an overclocking/underclocking utility for it as a
way of increasing the number of "levels" offered by the program.  Afterburner
won't work with PalmOS 5 or higher, and I'm not sure if there's an equivalent
utility for PalmOS 5.

Travers



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