Guten Morgen,

Ich schreibe mal auf Englisch weil oft ist es schwer mich auf Deutsch richtig auszudruecken.

I am surprised to see that people would really assume that I would be continuing these tests just to prove that I am right and you are wrong. It has absolutely nothing to do with this, especially since I am hoping that you all realize that the chances of finding the right parameter configuration would be much harder than finding a needle in a haystack and would take about a thousand years.

What these tests do show very well even after testing only 10 parameter configurations is that there exists enough move variation to change the whole behavior of the Horvath program. In fact these 10 parameter tests have shown already that from initial 11 move deviations with Igor and Ivan playing standard parameter #5 you are down to only about 4 move deviations with Igor and 2 move deviations with Ivan by adding the other 9 tested parameters. This surely has to provide some good indications that it would be possible to find the Igor style and the Ivan style within the other 99,999,999,999,990 parameters that have not been tried yet. I am certainly not going to try them. I don't have the time, nor a long enough life or even interest in this.

Add to this the new test that show 3 possible versions (or start configurations) you now have a situation where you have to test 3 x 100,000,000,000,000. So which one do you test? Best guess would be Legend 2 since we know that Excalibur sold this computer just before selling Ivan.

So what is so special about Ivan other than it being 2 MHz faster and removal of parameters? The Voice? There is nothing magical that needs to happen when you add voice to a computer as far as I am concerned. You don’t have to add that programming language into the chess program itself to accommodate voice. That would be a very long winded approach and far too much work. In fact I suspect that the voice program is a totally independent program that runs concurrently with the chess program and just reacts to the finger presses on the keys and chess board and the computer sensory board response impulses. It does not affect the chess program in any way at all. Therefore probably you can add voice to any chess computer if the manufacturer wanted to. No magic here. The same probably applies with adding help features for preprogrammed position setups. There is probably no magic here as well, it is probably a separate program that runs concurrently when activated. So all these types of differences are in my opinion just misdirection’s to add different experiences and choices to future customers, while the base chess program remains virtually unchanged, unless of course the actual chess programmer sent in a different update version which was then used. Who is to say that a programmer did not send in two or three or four versions of his programs which allowed the manufacturer to choose whatever version he felt like for his next computer design? The manufacturer may have even asked for multiple versions when engaging a programmer for testing purposes.

It is a pity that we often choose to ignore common daily life logic. I don't care at the end of the day who wrote the program, but I am not going to waste my time pursuing not proven assumptions or opinions that have no foundation of truth behind them. As far as I am concerned Igor, Ivan and as a matter of fact all Excalibur's remain as "Programmer Unknown" until proven facts are provided. My website shows them as Unknown; my test report photos here in these forum posts show them as Unknown.

Having said that, I do strongly lean towards thinking that all Excalibur are based around 3 programmers, Levy, Danielsen and Horvath. This, I think is much more likely than someone in China that no one has ever heard of, writing a quality program or even Ron Nelson a production director at Excalibur whose chess programming limitations at Fidelity are well known to everyone, all of a sudden writing a quality program 20 years later.

A man is walking down the street with his girlfriend and takes this photo. His girlfriend sees him take the photo and reacts angrily to her boyfriend. Take a look at the photo and can you see why the girlfriend reacts angrily and says “How could you?” to her boyfriend. The boyfriend responded to her “How could I not?”:


Regarding the Tests themselves that I have posted here, how many of you knew previously that there are maybe 3 or even 4 versions of Horvath? I suspect no one did. I did not know that. So therefore is it not interesting to find out about this?

In my first test, how many of you noticed that the two 15th century player performances were rated as well? How many of you compared the results of the computers against the two human players to see that they were in fact stronger then 15th century chess players? Were you being misdirected? I suspect yes, because after all none of you asked any questions. Or am I experiencing apathy instead?

I repeated the test with a 18th century game. Did any of you notice the performance improvement from the 18th century players? How did this compare to the computers tested? Were the human players an equal match to the computers? Or is this all totally uninteresting to you? Are we all following the ass instead of the dog?

Excalibur Electronics were absolute masters of misdirection, I know I have all their computers  In the end it bit them in the ass, people got tired of buying them.

Ps. Did you even notice the dog driving the car in the photo?

Viele Gruesse,

Nick

Hm, verry nice...dog what else!

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Schach ist das Spiel, das die Verrückten gesund hält. (Albert Einstein)

No matter what Ron nelsons function was at fidelity or Excalibur.
He had written a chess program for z80a before spracklen came to fidelity,
IMO this program plays kind of similar chess like the later h8 machines, only that the h8 programs came deeper.

This program was maybe continued and transferred on different hardware.
Why should he not continue or transfer it on other machines ?
Or tell another programmer to transfer it ?
That is what ALL programmers do or have done.

Kittinger, morsch, ... Lang... They all let their programs transfer on new different hardware.

First z80a, 6502, 6301, 6800, h8...

Until today programmers use their engines as apps under iOS, android or windows.

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Die ganze Welt des Computerschachs

Sensibly speaking you are absolutely right. That is exactly what most chess programmers do and still do today and they would be making improvements as they see them. Just like chess computers is our passion, the chess program is their passion.

It is for this reason that your theory does not work. Nelson's passion was selling chess computers and adding innovations to them. He loved the voice, he loved the robot concept. Exactly like your statement, he carried these over to Excalibur.

Your logic however does not work for Nelson and chess programming, because of exactly the reasons that you have stated in this post of yours.

ps. I forget, the robot concept came from MB, so that really is not Nelson either. Which leaves voice, I don't know if this could be credited to Nelson. His passion for this is not in question though since Excalibur expanded on these concepts.

Regarding voice, did you know I opened recently Sharper Image Talking Chess which is exactly the same as Fidelity Little Chesster. The manufacturer name on the ROM was H&G. Hegener + Glaser. So now I am not even sure where the voice came from?


Best regards,

Nick

Here is a nice little fairy tale, especially written for Thorsten

The year is 19xx. We have a brilliant engineer who knows manufacturing and who has sufficient programming knowledge to be able to program the turning “on and off” of switches and responses to key press impulses on other gadgets. One day he meets with a man who has a business and money and they discuss business opportunities in the new electronics industry.

At the same time one of them if not both are aware of all the hype around a famous man and his bet about chess programs never being able to beat him. They are also aware of the large public interest for computer chess.
And the engineer says: “I bet I could build a table chess computer!” and the financer says: “Well if you could, then we would both become extremely rich and famous! And I would finance this immediately if you can do this!”

So the engineer goes home and starts working on this project. And he works hard designing on paper how the table computer should look. LCD display, signals and responses to key presses and small chess board. The engineer is happy, he has a computer designed! Yippee! But, now he has to develop a chess program and he begins working on this all alone in his spare time because he still has a 9 to 5 job to go to in order to make money for his family.

After extensive research, the engineer sees that his idea for a table chess computer is not exactly unique and he sees that there are many other companies also already working hard on this.

This knowledge adds to his pressure of having to find a way to develop a chess program as quickly as possible all alone and in his spare time. And it is a big problem because he knows that it has taken whole teams of really intelligent and brilliant students and professors in Universities more than 10 years to develop their programs and the code for this is not accessible to the public and he has only 6 months to do all this from scratch. So he thinks and he researches and worries about this every day.

One day, he reads an article about a hand-made computer and a program that you can manually key into this computer! At first he is a little disappointed, since technically after all he might not be the first to invent one. But he soon forgets his disappointment because after all this computer is not the same! It is not a table chess computer!

So he takes this program, studies it day and night after work and weekends, pulls it apart and completely changes it and behold it works!

But just like the original that he copied, it is not perfect, but it now looks very different and plays better, and no one will be able to tell. However, it still cannot promote pieces, it cannot checkmate, the key inputs although very much changed and better than the original, still does not follow standard chess notations.

He needs more time but he has no more time, the financier is impatient because he is worried about the competition and he wants to be first and not second.

So the product is launched before it is ready, upgrades are promised to disappointed customers, but who cares the world has a chess computer!

Viele gruesse,

Nick

Ron Nelson had a chess program for Z80A. this is in many older dedicated chess computers we know.

in the end it was in sensory voice

Fidelity Voice Sensory Chess Challenger

then came spracklen.
they used the same body and put in the 6502 motherboard and sold the machine as

Fidelity Champion Sensory Chess Challenger

So what do you expect ron nelson to do ? throw his chess program into
the trash bin ?

of course not.
he made backups and waited until he could refurbish it.

and the day came.

a new company was founded. with the rest of the old company.
now if you have less money, would you BUY another program or take the program you have in your desk for free because you wrote it yourself ??

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Die ganze Welt des Computerschachs

Come on, how do you think he managed to get a 1000 ELO Program up to 1900 with his old Challenger program? If he did he would have used them on the weaker computers instead of using David Levy's.

There is maybe a difference between 80 Elo between Ron nelsons and spracklens program if you consider that the hardware was twice as fast due to the 6502 beeing faster then the z80 cpu.

It was not 1000 but 13xy Elo and the h8 is many times faster then the z80.

__________________
Die ganze Welt des Computerschachs

Can anybody calculate the speed difference between the Z80/4MHz and H8/12MHz processor in ELO?

Active list:

Fidelty Sensory Voice z80 4MHz = 1179
Excalibur Igor H8 12MHz = 1834


@Nick We all know that you have tested the Horvath progs a lot. Is there any of the style that fits the Excalibur Igor moves? The "standard" style of the f.e. Regency plays totally different than the Igor.

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http://chess-computer.blogspot.com/

This is not easy as there is no direkt comparision of instructions. The H8 can do more 16-bit, can do more bit manipulation, has MUL and DIV and is faster overall. One try:

The H8 ist faster per instruction, most need 2 states compared with 4+ on the Z80. A factor of 5 seems reasonable, this would take 10 states on a Z80 for simple instructions and 20 for more complicated ones.

A factor of 3 comes with clock speed so a H8 is 15 times faster in this calculation. If we take one doubling gives 50 to 100 Elo, this is about 200 to 400 Elo.

The Fidelity Voice Sensory Chess Challenger is given with 1394 Elo, adding the 200-400 for the faster chip this gives about 1600 to 1800 Elo compared to 1845 Elo for the Excalibur Igor. This seems reasonable.

The programs are different in size and can use varying memory 16+4 (ROM+RAM) K versus 32+1 K. Less RAM means less space for move lists so the older program cannot just be ported. I don't think a program from Nelson could be written for another processor and just a fourth of RAM with more ease than using another program or starting from scratch.