NBA Chess.

The NBA says Chess and basketball are more similar than we think.  What do you think?

Edchess, Revisited.

In May of 2007 I wrote a short post about Edchess,  chess playing software that I used back around 1990.  Dave Hendricks, one of the authors of Edchess, saw the post and was kind enough to provide some additional technical info on the software.  He writes:

“The seed was the Pascal chess game included in a book/software package called Turbo GameWorks from Borland. I manually converted it to C and showed it to John (Bell). He agreed to take it on as a joint project. John’s principal responsibility was user interface and marketing. Mine was engine tuning.

That tuning involved:
1. adding to the opening library.
2. tuning the weights in the heuristics, and adding new tests.

The tuning was accomplished with special autoplay builds, in which the the base game played against a modified version. It would do a coin flip to decide whether the base game was white or black. At the end of each game, statistics were updated and written to a central file. It supported multitasking, so we would typically run 4-8 simultaneous matches overnight to get meaning statistics. If a challenger convincingly beat the base version, it became the new base version.

I toyed with the idea of leaving the statistical evolution in the base game, to provide rudimentary AI. It would in theory learn to play better after many contests with a skilled opponent. The hitch is that the pattern recognition wasn’t sufficiently rich to determine what the superior opponent did exactly, in a form to implement in its own logic.

After about a year of that, plus feedback from several strong users, it was released – first as shareware, then in a published version via Prosoft (defunct, I believe). We never made the transition to Windows, though we made an abortive attempt to write a version for Palm and other mobile devices.”

I thank Dave for providing this information, and to both Dave and John T. Bell for the work they put into Edchess…Rich

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