TalkChess.com

Why are chess computers no longer important?

In the eighties, they had more powerful chess computers than the computers at home.

Now there isn't even a chess computer equal on PS3, a previous generation of game consoles.

Reasons:

1) most high-end dedicated units in the 80s were on Motorola 68k, but it was Intel's x86 who won the race. Mostly because 68k was used in home computers where most games wouldn't work with more than 68k at 8 MHz, so nobody bought faster models, so Motorola couldn't sell them.

2) once CPUs started getting fast, their energy consumption went up. A power supply unit and a cooling solution inside a small chess computer housing was not possible without a lot of noise since the fans had to be quite small.

3) a PC is more versatile, and the additional cost of a chess engine was much less than a whole chess computer that would only play chess.

4) position and game analysis was (and is) much more comfortable with a PC.

We have 4 new dedicated chess computer companies. All with new chess computers.


Phoenix in NL
millennium Chess in Germany.
Pewatronic in Switzerland
DGT in Netherlands.


They have arround 12 models including different hardware platforms and different programs.

So why do we need a pc ??

We don’t need a pc.

A dedicated chess computer with LC0 is only a matter of time IMO.

Phones are better

menniepals wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 3:33 pm Phones are better

The smaller the object the higher the chance it gets lost. Why did not I buy a desk top?? Just because I could not transport it.

How difficult it is to get a taxi (Not). Being an idiot or being brainwashed. Modern inventions usually rubbish.
Even think my new laptop is slower or less predictable in response time than my old one.

Never in my life have I been able to keep a pen for longer than two months. Imagine computers being as small as a pen.
Then I would have to buy a new computer every two months. Usually I buy pens in sets of four.
Imagine how expensive that would be unless you can buy a computer for a dollar.

menniepals wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 3:33 pm Phones are better

But they have no chess board

mclane wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 4:40 pm

menniepals wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 3:33 pm Phones are better

But they have no chess board

It's the convenience. The younger players today are so used playing online.

mclane wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 4:40 pm

menniepals wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 3:33 pm Phones are better

But they have no chess board

In the 80s and 90s I had a sensory chess board computer fidelity excellence. In 2008 I talked to a friend about what it takes to make an electronic chess computer program for my chess program I had made, Pulsar. Basically he said(he has an Electrical engineering degree) you have to program your chip of course with an electrical engineer then order from the Chinese in lots of I think he said 1000. So if cost is 50 bucks for my board I need to order 50 * 1000 or spend 50,000 to see if I can sell 1000 pulsar ore whatever is enough to profit or not lose to bad.

I didn't do this not having the money or the certainty at the time. In 2014 I went a different route. I made an iPhone/iPad version of pulsar. In 2019 an Android. If someone has a phone or wants a bigger screen and buys a tablet, iPads can be found around 300 US dollars and Android tablets at the lower end some decent ones starting around 150 like a kindle fire, they can now load from their App Store many programs onto the same hardware. They can have Pulsar, Shredder, DroidFish if on android, Chess Tiger, Smallfish if on iOS, Chess for Android and others. And on top of that also more database like programs can be loaded onto device which were never offered by the dedicated chess computers. Things like OpeningTree or Analyze this.

The draw back is you don't get a real board and pieces this way. But if on screen boards on phones are too small, tablets are probably fine. For those who want a board there are those DGT boards that can be hooked up to some computer and some phone software. Chess for Android supports DGT board. So I think the best situation is what we have now you buy the hardware ( the tablet for example ) separate then get the software and choices of many programs now.

menniepals wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 3:20 am

mclane wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 4:40 pm

menniepals wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 3:33 pm Phones are better

But they have no chess board

It's the convenience. The younger players today are so used playing online.

You can buy a chess board separately. It is a much cheaper alternative. Chess computers are beautiful. But you need to spend more money.

I would definitely recommend one of the Italian Certabo boards that have a led on every square which the DGT boards don't.
Their software runs on a PC plus you can also connect to Aart Bik's Chess for Android app.

A software update was released a few days ago, details below and details of their boards can be found at Certabo.com


Certabo Software
PC VERSION Release 2.90  17-Aug. 2019
Download the latest 2.90 release of software. 
Download 64 bit Certabo Chess 2.90 for PC
Download 32 bit Certabo Chess 2.90 for PC
New features include:
1) This release has some general improvements and handles now opening books. What you need to do like for engines just drop the .bin opening book files in the books directory. Any polyglot book is supported. You can download famous Cerbellum from here https://zipproth.com/Brainfish/download/ but very  many are available on internet, just drop them in the books dir and they will apperan in the menu for selection.
2) We also added a modding possibility and instead running with double click on Certabo icon go in the Certabo directory and double click on Deep_Engine_Searching_Mode.bat this will launch a version with very high limit on depth so you will see as max depth  the value  stated in the file which by default is 50. Anyhow theoretically there is no limit on that value you can open the file with any txt editor and change 50 to any wanted value. Remember if you want to enable the syzygy tablebase you need to activate them  creating in users\youruser\AppData\Local\Certabo\GUI\ an additional directory called syzygy and putting there your tablebase to  have them properly loaded.