The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 58

4c COMPUTERS THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 19 All square in learning to make right moves Review the magnitude of your loss when you're being beaten; it's not always obvious to new players that you shouldn't sacrifice too many pieces too early in order to get what you think will be an advantage in attack. It's great for the self-esteem to acquire some vocabulary early on in your chess career, too. You may think you were just moving your queen's pawn forward one. Wrong. That was the Nimzowitsch-Larsen Attack.

(Preparatory of course, to the fian-chetto of your bishop). The gameplay is not cold and machine-like. In common with flesh-and-blood players, Chessmaster (at least at the beginners level) makes some good moves but then stuffs up and gives its queen away. The level of the moves is not entirely predictable, and some games are harder than others. The sensation is of having a devious but fallible opponent inside the screen.

As you move through the various training levels, you can -pick other types of exposition. You may want the software to show you which of your pieces were threatened, or which of your opponents' pieces you were threatening. You may want the computer to tell you how many moves away from a checkmate the game is. If you try to make an illegal move, you're told why you can't in awesome natural language (they CANT have a database that large the software must be assembling the instructions directly from the board positions). They're all basic, friendly suggestions and stop short of the more portentous and flavoursorae chess adages; this program won't tell you to "beware the bishop on the long JULIE ROBOTHAM CHESSM ASTER 5000 Win95 CD-ROM Distributed by Mindscape International RRP; $49.95 GHESSMASTER has up-scale credentials, but it must also be one of the best and friendliest ways to learn chess from scratch.

As a newcomer you can click on any piece and all the legal moves available to you will be shown in shadow form on the board. There are sound effects too useful for new players because they reward you when you score well and emphasise Chessmaster 5000 interface, left, the randomness of their play, their propensity to attack or defend, and how much they hate a draw. There's a database of 27,000 real games, which you can search according to player names, opening variation, event and result as well as your own structured queries. Make your move The basic You can save any game, import in a variety of formats (good for playing over the Internet), or play against Bobby Fischer. Didn't he disappear years ago? Yes, but his personality, and dozens of others, have been programmed into the software.

Or build your own opponents customised for and a Mycenean chess set, one And for those who favour style over content, try playing with deco figures or scarab beetles on boards of green marble or china teak. The overall impression of the interface is an unappealing dull brown, though. Presumably its supposed to be redolent of gentleman's club all of the program's many options. rosewood chess tables and leather-top cigar boxes. It also comes with a TrueType chess font so you can print the games from your laser printer.

Chessmaster 5000 supports remote play for human opponents via a modem or over a LAN and the program is absurdly good value. Mere mortals checkmated because it facilitates person-to-person games. Will computers ever be able to routinely trounce human opponents? Inevitably, Stidham thinks, but he couldn't care less. "I can't have a friendly argument with a computer about the wisdom of using the Morra Gambit against the Sicilian Defence. I can't brag to a computer about my stunning come-from-behind victory in last year's class championship." Internet Chess Resources Caissa's Web http:catssa.com.

Australian Free Internet Chess tehet203J7J67.4:5000 Chess Space. The biggest list of chess jumpsrtes and resources on the Web. http:www.chess-spaM.com. To find out more about the programming techniques behind the greatest chess simulators: http:www.ns.iia.nluserjpirechesj publications Full commentary on this year's KasparovDeep Blue play-off: http:wwandrnaster.lc.cacheuD81iie kbtueJitml The Internet Chess Club lets you download a viewer to watch Java-based games httpwww Jiydra.comkc The annual Harvard Cup Human Versus Computer Chess Challenge International e-mail chess Group httpywww.ub.uitjwdiessiececginfoJrtml that offers a simple set of rules that can be learned by anyone, anywhere. Traditional barriers to cultural interaction such as language or religious belief are exchanged for a board with 64 black and white squares and 32 chess pieces." Stidham says Caissa's Web is visited by numerous people with little opportunity for face-to-face games.

It's easy, says Stidham, to make a case that on-line chess lacks the civilised, almost ceremonial personal interaction that's a part of the traditional game. But you can also claim the opposite: "The sense of community among Caissa members is still palpable. The sheer novelty of it conversing and competing with others from literally the other side of the earth on a daily basis creates its own sense of culture." Another graphical on-line hangout is the Internet Chess Club, of which a reviewer wrote: "It was overwhelming, mind-boggling. I was playing a game with somebody in Chile while somebody in Finland peeked over my shoulder and typed on my screen that I was a stupid patzer to sacrifice my knight on b6." Both the sites require you to play under a nickname or "handle" (it's fairly standard macho gaming stuff Dioroid was playing Raptor at Caissa one day last week) and let you enter your own rating to select opponents of a similar standard, or the site will rate you after 10 games. For Stidham, the Internet is much more important to the progress of don't expect.

Sometimes it's a good move that you just didn't see; more often than that it's not good." Johansen sees no significant trend towards using the newest methods of computer reasoning such as neural networks among chess programmers. They are, he says, "hanging in there with brute force and ever faster While the grandmasters thrash it out against the machines at the high end, computers and people are playing on the same side in other quarters. Technology, and in particular the Internet, is facilitating the teaching and playing of chess. Internet chess is not a new phenomenon. E-mail chess, the equivalent of postal correspondence chess, has been around for years.

More recently, telnet chess came to the fore, allowing people to play live or nearly live by tapping into an open channel at an Internet server. But for newcomers to the game, the strings of raw numerical data were cold and off-putting, even if they could set up the moves on a physical board at their end of the link. There are now some graphical sites for playing chess over the Web, the best established and most professional of which is Caissa's Web (Caissa is the patron goddess of chess) at http:caissa.com, which hosts about 6,000 games daily. The site's system administrator, Todd Stidham, says an international resurgence in chess's popularity is due in no small measure to the Net: "Chess is one of the few activities From Page 1 international masters on its consultants' team, imbuing the software with a variety of playing styles as well as horsepower. And there's plenty of competition between the programs.

Every December in the US, the top chess sims are pitted against human grandmasters in the Harvard Cup Human Versus Computer Chess Challenge. Last December, in 10-minute a side games, grandmasters Michael Rohde and Joel Benjamin (a member of the Deep Blue programming team) each won 4.5 of their six games. Virtual Chess, from I-Motion Interactive, was the best performing software, with 3.5 victories in six games, closely followed by the earlier version of Chessmaster 4000, with three games to its credit Clearly, computers are catching up. At the moment, in standard competition, says Parr, the best chess programs are at "low grandmaster Impressive to us mere mortals, but a far cry from the inspirational brilliance of Kasparov. Darryl Johansen is one of two Australian grandmasters and a former competition adversary of Deep Thought, the predecessor of Deep Blue (the latter IBM claims is 300 times more powerful).

He says the computer's style was: "Artificial, computeresque." "In chess at a high level there's a fair chance of predicting about three-quarters of your opponent's moves. Every now and then the computer plays a move you really eae you chess this century than Deep Blue Shops lead on cheap phone deals Total annual dollar cost OY 1 A I 1520 01 1430 ih 1333 1261 128 Dick Smith Electronics I I Winterton Communications Optus 1W2 H2L 1073 958 922 918 753 771 764 SWITCH 584 584 609 fj 0 0 Everyone's talking it. When you see the Silicon Graphics 02 Workstation at work, it'll take your breath away. In fact, at 10 times the speed of the Indy, the 02 has to be seen to be believed. Along with the most powerful visualisation super computer ever built, the new 0nyx2.

And the breakthrough 0rigin200 and 0rigin2000 scaleable servers. Come and at the leading edge of digital media, graphics workstations and scaleable servers, at the Australian Satellite Broadcast Launch October 30th L1Vl i-il (What's the bet your competitors will be there?) 30 150 60 90 120 Number of twrHninute. off-peak calls a month J9f PHILLIP BERT0LUS WHEN looking for some of the cheapest digital phone deals in town today, the retail players come out best, reflecting the different nature of the low-priced end of the market Dick Smith Electronics comes up trumps, then Winterton Communications, then Optus. Digital phones are still more expensive to own than the older analog technology. Dick Smith will sell you an analog NEC Sportz II for $79 and connect you up for $45 to Telstra's $10-a-month plan.

All-up cost: just $244 in the first year, provided you don't make a single call. All you pay is $79 to walk out of the shop with a working phone (after you charge the batteries). The lowest-priced current-model digital phone on the market is the Philips Fizz. This on 1800 251 073 or email us on 02sydney.sgi.com column graphed the cost of owning a Fizz for 12 months, although some of the contracts extend to 15 months. The graph shows the number of two-minute, off-peak calls made each month and the annual bill.

Dick Smith Electronics will sell you a Fizz for $149 and connect it to Telstra MobileNet Digital for $65, after which you'll be charged at a rate of $20 a month for the duration of the contract. You will also have to pay for any calls-you make. Winterton Communications, a reseller of Vodafone, sells the Fizz for $159. The usual $65 connection fee applies to the $30-a-month access fee plan. Winterton's off-peak call rates are slightly higher than those of Telstra, but calling Perth costs the same as calling the next-door neighbour.

Optus obviously doesn't- want low-volume callers on its network. Having decided recently to abandon the $10-a-month analog market, Optus is keen to get people making calls on the network. The Optus Fizz deal is the priciest of the three examined here. Optus dealers are keen to get customers onto their version of the Nokia 1620 FreeStyle deals, which include free weekend off-peak calls. Optus's FreeStyle deal beats its Fizz deal on two fronts.

The minimum 12-month cost is $504 compared with $584, and the off-peak call rate is 10 cents for 30 seconds, compared with 13 cents. Sef SiIcon Graphics Computer Systems SIL 0014 The HALE Agency Silicon Graphics the Silicon Graphics Lmj, Origin, 02 Indy are registered trade marks of Silicon Graphics Inc. When you buy Compcxq Dkpro, you cx rest eas inna Vnowledje. that you're buynq from The world's nvnber one PCcopan. 7 ror an imbrmaAioh pacK Cx CQfifPAL ijoo oboyoo a a I -v.

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