Friday, June 22, 2012

Alan Turing

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Alan Turing (June 23, 1912 – June 7, 1954) was a British mathematician and logician who is considered the father of computer science and artificial intelligence (AI). Among his accomplishments were: an independent proof that Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem was, in general, unsolvable; the invention of the idea of Turing machines; the formulation of the halting problem; played an integral part in breaking the German ciphers in WWII; presented the first design for a stored-program computer; discovered LU decomposition (used to solve matrix equations); invented the idea of the Turing test to determine if a computer could successfully imitate a human; and contributed work in the field of mathematical biology.

Monday, June 18, 2012

Novag Super Constellation

The Super Constellation, also known as the Super Connie, was a dedicated chess computer manufactured by Novag and first sold in 1984. The chess playing code was written by the acclaimed computer chess programmer Dave Kittinger, who was also known for writing the engine for ChessMaster 2000 and his DOS program WChess. Scott McDonald, an American chess master, assisted Kittinger.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Chess for Mobile Devices: CHESS PRO

CHESS PRO ($9.99): A chess program created by Christophe Théron for iOS devices. The engine within the program is Christophe's famous Chess Tiger.

Chess for Mobile Devices: Chess For Android

This is inspired by my friend Julien MARCEL, who has been posting about chess programs for iOS devices at TalkChess. I will attempt to cover chess programs for iOS devices (using Julien's TalkChess posts) and chess programs for Android devices.

The first program I will post about is the Android program I use and love:

Chess for Android (Free) : A computer chess GUI for Android devices created by Aart Bik.

Monday, June 4, 2012

Also-Rans Rating List Update - June 4, 2012

I have updated the rating list. I have added more games for Blikskottel 0.8, Eden 0.0.13, Gargamella 0.5.0, Gullydeckel 2.16pl1, JChess 1.0, Kanguruh 1.93, PLP 1661571, and Chad's Chess 0.15. Also, I have added CmcChess 2.27, Freyr 1.09 64-bit JA, and Mephisto MM5.1 to the list.

The games can be found at this link.

Friday, June 1, 2012

HGM and The Matchbox Chess Computer

The types of computers used to play chess have been varied. For example, El Ajedrecista was an electro-mechanical computer that could play and win KRK endgames: