Author: Fernando Villegas
Date: 15:01:07 07/03/04
Consider all that follows as a very short, unuseful and born-from-saturday-boring-musings despicable essay. It's purpose is to discover and explain the obsolete, almost preposterous pleasure of some people here that persist purchasing, playing and cheriching old -very old, sometimes- chess dedicated units. Why? Some reasons has been given already, even by the sinners themselves, but those reasons are flawed and evade the real point. Let us see what has been said: a) Chess computers, specially older, let's the owner get draws and wins. b) Chess computers offer the pleasure of a sensible, material thing, its beauty of design, the feeling of a "real thing". But both, no matter how many times has been repeated, are false or at least does not touch the core of the matter. Why? a) Because chess software also let's the owner to get points if he want to, just weakening the engine trought many available ways. In this area some software even gives the added chance to learn something with specially customized weak or less-than-the--strongest levels. In this area a dedicated unit has not advantage at all. B) because that sensorial feeling of playing a pretty "real" board you can get the same with any software simply using a wood board with, if you want, the most lovely pieces your money can get. In this field only the most expensive dedicated units can give you a similar pleasure. Normally they are just plastic imitations of wood and/or wooden pieces of the most fragile, light and cheap stuff available. Then, which is the real reason behind the charm of a dedicated? I suppose it is this one: only a dedicated unit is an entity, an unextrincable unit of body and soul. A person. "THIS" fellow that plays this way and has these features, NOT a disengaged spirit lurking in the RAM of a PC in paralell with perhaps some other dozen processes. Not a ghost without body except the equally phantom-kind existence of a screen an its pixels or a far away board acting as a kind of contrivance for a crippled guy, a separate article, an artificial member. When playing my Par Excellence Fielity unit I do not say "I will play chess againts a program", but I say "I will play Par Excellence" and saying that I am saying an altogether different thing. As we christen our cars, we, old farts, has chiristened our units. They are real persons waiting for us, perhaps desirous to take revenge or repeat a win. There is a relatiship between them and us. They ARE real in a way a program cannot do. (All this written as playing Karpov at 40 moves in one hour) fernando
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