Ubisoft sold the rights to Encore, which has repackaged the final version ( Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition AKA "Chessmaster XI") as Chessmaster Collector's Edition . To add to the confusion, there is also Chessmaster: Art of Learning , which (I believe) is essentially the same version, but with a ...

This may not be the answer you were expecting, but you will benefit much more from playing against other people. Chess engines -- even when deliberately weakened -- don't play the same way humans do: they don't overlook moves, they don't form flawed plans, and don't have favorites or phobias. When ...

This may not be the answer you're looking for, but I wrestled with the same problem before giving up and paying for the exposed check test after every e.p. capture if (and only if) the King is on the 4th/5th rank. After parsing over a million games from TWIC, this scenario occurred less than 0.01 ...

In the past couple of weeks, PGN downloads from http://www.theweekinchess.com have started giving my PGN parser fits. It seems that several files now contain games where a pair of hyphens ("--") appear in place of a move; twic1025.pgn has dozens of occurrences. Typically, these are at the end of the ...

I would recommend that you start at either http://www.chess.com or http://www.playchess.com , both of which offer puzzles, training, and a chance to play other people. You can try them for free, but both require a paid membership (usually US$50-US$100/year) for full access. If you are completely new ...

You might also look at some sample chess engines that other's have published. I would start with Tom Kerrigan's Simple Chess Program aka TSCP ( http://www.tckerrigan.com/Chess/TSCP ); it is written in C, and was designed for clarity and is thoroughly commented. Once you get to the point where you ...

Both the Nook and the Kindle are "jailed" tablets: general-purpose tablets that are deliberately locked down to run the Nook/Kindle software. I can't speak for the Nook, but my wife's Kindle Fire HD is an Android tablet "under the covers". If you just want to read books, I suggest you look at ...

A move generator that I wrote in Java has a special-purpose "test move" function that makes just enough of the move to allow bitboard attacks to be computed. It doesn't change the player, full/half move clocks, castling privileges, or Zobrist hash: all it does is update the piece bitmaps so that ...

The graphics requirements for Fritz are very modest compared to some of today's games; where the fine print says "graphics card", interpret that as "hardware acceleration for 3D graphics". Many contemporary laptops have at least entry-level 3D chipsets, but it never hurts to ask. If they try to sell ...

While rampaging around the Wild Wild Web, I ran across a comparatively new perft utility at https://github.com/ankan-ban/perft_cpu . It was written in the summer of 2013 by Ankan Banerjee, and there is a series of forum postings about it here: http://www.talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=48387 ...