World's 1st Computer Chess Unit to Appear at NUIG Digital Games Event

Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2013

Hello everyone,

 

This interesting chess news comes from Ireland. Kernan Andrews, writing in the Galway Advertiser, states the world’s first computer chess unit will make an appearance at NUI Galway’s Coding Computer Games – Past, Present & the Future event on Saturday March 2. The event runs from 12 noon to 2pm in the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, IDA/NUIG Business Park Dangan.

The Fidelity Chess Challenger was the first chess electronic unit available to the public. Based on a Z80 8-bit micro-processor, it started production in 1977 with its most popular model, the Fidelity Chess Challenger 7, selling some 600,000 units. Its inventor Sidney Samole got the idea for computer chess after watching an episode of Star Trek.

Also at the event, Galway-based software developers such as Tribal City and Starcave Entertainment will demonstrate some of their latest web-based games. Children from the local Coderdojo club will introduce visitors to the coding behind their own games.

There will also be classic arcade games like Asteroids, Pacman, Sonic, and Pong played on vintage consoles and computers such as Atari, Amiga, and Sinclair ZX81.

The event is a collaboration of Coderdojo Galway, the Computer and Communications Museum of Ireland, and the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway, and is part of National Engineers Week.

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Creator of Belle chess playing machine dies at 76

Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2012
Hi everyone,

Joseph Henry Condon, an experimental physicist and engineer, died on January 2 at the age of 76. He, in partnership with Ken Thompson, created Belle, a pioneering combination of computer and special hardware that played championship quality chess.

 

 One of the major collaboration between Joe and Ken Thompson was the creation of the chess-playing machine named Belle. Joe designed custom hardware while Ken designed the software. The hardware evaluated board position, did piece move generation, and used a cache memory for previously evaluated board positions. Belle’s hardware could evaluate millions of board positions and generate all legal chess moves every second. The control software kept track of how many moves ahead the hardware was evaluating and selected the best current move. Belle was very compact and easily portable and was taken to many chess tournaments where it achieved a master rating. Belle won the world computer chess championship in 1980 and the U.S. computer chess championships in 1978, 1980, 1981, 1982, and 1986.

From Alexandra Kosteniuk's
www.chessblog.com
Also see her personal blog at
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Chess computer to be 'commentator' at Chess Olympiad in Khanty-Mansiysk

The mighty BlueGene

Hello Everyone,

We found this very interesting news that the super computer BlueGene will be providing live commentary at the 39th World Chess Olympiad that takes place from September 20 to October 3 in Khanty-Mansiysk, Western Siberia.

This is the first time such an event will take place.

Don't forget Veselin Topalov had used the BlueGene to prepare against Vishy Anand earlier this year for the World Chess Championship.

It's working will be like this: BlueGene will choose 20 interesting games from 600 while they are being played and being broadcast over the Internet. BlueGene will provide commentary in three languages. Russian programmers have prepared the software for this electronic commentator.

Incidentally, the 39th Chess Olympics will be the biggest ever as it will have the largest number of participants - more than 1,300 chess players from 158 countries and regions!

From Alexandra Kosteniuk's

www.chessblog.com

Also see her personal blog at

www.chessqueen.com