Chessmaster Personality Development

[mloftus955]

I have a newbie type question.
I realize that Johan De Koning is the programmer of the highly succesful King engine. Who was responsible for the development of the varying personalitites like "Josh age 8", "Josh age 9", and age 12 etc. found in Chessmaster 9000 and 10th Edition? They are interesting opponents. I just wonder who helped in their development, and was it done from many of his early games?


Thanks,

Mark Loftus
Savannah, GA

[JVMerlino]

The personalities in Chessmaster were, for the most part, created by Becca Martinson (content developer) and myself (project lead). This applies to all of the "fake" personalities.

The GM personalities were created by a combination of several chess professionals (GMs Seirawan and Evans, plus another person -- not a GM -- whose name I cannot recall at the time).

The Waitzkin personalities were created with the assistance of Josh himself.

All of the opening books for the GMs and Waitzkin personalities were created from their games. There are no moves in those books that were not played by the person in some real game.

jm

[mloftus955]

Thanks, John.

The Waitzkin personalities make for some interesting games. Some of his youthful aggressiveness can be seen. My rating is about 1450 so it is interesting for me to play programs at that level since those levels are above my rating. My best chance in those games is to survive till the endgame, there are some good tactical shots those personalities make.

The other under 2200 personalities are not based on real people, I had figured that. All in all I think the CM9000 and 10th Edition were well done, unfortunately my CM8000 doesn't work with Windows XP.

It does bring up the question if a program personality can be so tuned to a person's tendencies (particularly captured in a program that plays like a human), and similar book moves, that you can create a way to for a GM to practice before a match against another grandmaster.


Mark Loftus

[Sylwy]

The personalities in Chessmaster were, for the most part, created by Becca Martinson (content developer) and myself (project lead). This applies to all of the "fake" personalities.

The GM personalities were created by a combination of several chess professionals (GMs Seirawan and Evans, plus another person -- not a GM -- whose name I cannot recall at the time).

The Waitzkin personalities were created with the assistance of Josh himself.

All of the opening books for the GMs and Waitzkin personalities were created from their games. There are no moves in those books that were not played by the person in some real game.

jm

Hi John !

For me , the computer chess means essentially - from many years - three projects:

-Chessmaster;
-Fritz;
-Shredder.

Chessmaster is something special because:

-for a long periond was the single chess program being present in games shops , here in Romania ;
-I know some programmers who worked for this project (UbiSoft Romania) comming with CM 9000;
-his interesting tutorials ;
-the nice graphics;
-the flexibility of The King engine;
-many more.

This year is the 25-th anniversary of Chessmaster. Why not a "the 25-th anniversary edition" ( like was for the 10-th) ?
Not neccessary a new engine. Only Chessmaster XI with some new graphics and the whole collection of Chessmaster chess engines: WChess of Dave Kittinger and The King 2.0 - 3.50 of Johan de Koning !

Would be nice. Extremely nice for everybody here !

Regards,
SilvianR

[mloftus955]

Excellent idea! I hope the Chessmaster project is not over.
It would be interesting to see some of the old Chessmaster engines in a winboard or UCI format. That is on my wish list...

Now that Fritz (and the other top engines) are so good that they are way beyond most humans, I think Fritz with its excellent graphics may profit from developing some personalities that club players can play against where the outcome may be in doubt.


Mark