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Windows Vista: ultimate chess throwdown
Feb. 25th, 2007 | 02:45 pm
As I'm sure most of you know, Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system came out last month, and I've been playing with the Home Premium edition for a few weeks now. Controversy surrounds Vista, about its security, its proprietary nature, its high system requirements, and a host of other issues. So today I'm going to discuss one of the most important issues Vista raises.
Namely, how well can it play chess?
In the Premium and Ultimate editions of Vista, Microsoft included a little game called Chess Titans, developed on their behalf by Oberon Software. (I have a sneaking suspicion Microsoft only included it because Mac OS X has an included chess game.) Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I'm not a very good chess player; mediocre at best, haphazard at worst. But I still enjoy the game, and thought I'd see how well Chess Titans played. The game has a little slider that lets you adjust the difficulty from one to ten. I decided to play three games, the first at difficulty one, the second at five, and the third all the way at ten.
Here's how the first game turned out (I played white in all three games):
It lasted barely five minutes. The computer could have done any number of things to stop checkmate, but it didn't. I suppose at difficulty one Chess Titans only considers a limited number of moves, and might even make a deliberate blunder from time to time.
Game number two, set at difficulty five, didn't turn out quite so well:
I managed to hold my own for the first half of the game, but soon enough the computer was dictating the tempo of the game, which is not a good place to be. I lost my queen, and from there, it was all downhill. I suspect if I made a few different moves in the midgame it would have turned out differently, but I was soundly beaten.
On to game number three, then. This one took a while, since the computer took the better part of forty seconds to decide on a move (and maxed out one of my processor cores in the process).
No doubt it was simply doing a brute-force calculation to determine the best possible move. In the early days of chess programs, computer scientists tried to use heuristics to mimic human thought processes. With the raw power of a modern processor, it's far more efficient to simply calculate every possible move and then decide on the best one. And as you might expect, this lead inevitably to total pwnage:
All in all, Chess Titans is a fun little program, with quite good graphics, though something like Chessmaster 10 is a far more comprehensive program. It's a pity, though, that we can't pit Chess Titans against the Mac OS Chess App in a final, winner-takes-all chess match to settle the OS wars once and for all.
-JM
Namely, how well can it play chess?
In the Premium and Ultimate editions of Vista, Microsoft included a little game called Chess Titans, developed on their behalf by Oberon Software. (I have a sneaking suspicion Microsoft only included it because Mac OS X has an included chess game.) Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I'm not a very good chess player; mediocre at best, haphazard at worst. But I still enjoy the game, and thought I'd see how well Chess Titans played. The game has a little slider that lets you adjust the difficulty from one to ten. I decided to play three games, the first at difficulty one, the second at five, and the third all the way at ten.
Here's how the first game turned out (I played white in all three games):
It lasted barely five minutes. The computer could have done any number of things to stop checkmate, but it didn't. I suppose at difficulty one Chess Titans only considers a limited number of moves, and might even make a deliberate blunder from time to time.
Game number two, set at difficulty five, didn't turn out quite so well:
I managed to hold my own for the first half of the game, but soon enough the computer was dictating the tempo of the game, which is not a good place to be. I lost my queen, and from there, it was all downhill. I suspect if I made a few different moves in the midgame it would have turned out differently, but I was soundly beaten.
On to game number three, then. This one took a while, since the computer took the better part of forty seconds to decide on a move (and maxed out one of my processor cores in the process).
No doubt it was simply doing a brute-force calculation to determine the best possible move. In the early days of chess programs, computer scientists tried to use heuristics to mimic human thought processes. With the raw power of a modern processor, it's far more efficient to simply calculate every possible move and then decide on the best one. And as you might expect, this lead inevitably to total pwnage:
All in all, Chess Titans is a fun little program, with quite good graphics, though something like Chessmaster 10 is a far more comprehensive program. It's a pity, though, that we can't pit Chess Titans against the Mac OS Chess App in a final, winner-takes-all chess match to settle the OS wars once and for all.
-JM