Cstal DOS

[tmokonen]

Aren't you posting a link to software that is a commercial product , it is not freeware or open source. Just because it is on an abandonware site does not make it legal to share. I do not believe Talkchess supports the sharing of commercial products for free. You should consider removing the link you posted.

Chris Whittington has an account here, and is an active poster. You can ask him personally if it's OK to share his old products.

[mclane]

I am not so sure if Chris w. Is a big help in this.

He mainly sold his company oxford softworks and also chess system tal together with all sources to another company
and now lives in another country.
He was not very constructive when it came about chess system tal in this forum.

[Ovyron]

But all we need to do is copying Cstal moves, as long as we can run it and ask it for a move, we can make something that plays its moves and we don't need its source.

What is missing is people posting examples of positions where Cstal plays some unique move and that's what makes its style unique, then perhaps someone can create some Rodent Cstal personality that mimics those moves and we move on with our lives.

[tmokonen]

I am not so sure if Chris w. Is a big help in this.

He mainly sold his company oxford softworks and also chess system tal together with all sources to another company
and now lives in another country.
He was not very constructive when it came about chess system tal in this forum.

I didn't know that Chris sold off his rights. Thanks for the clarification.

[karger]

Chris W. sold the rights of CSTal to Purple software , which later folded. The last version was CSTal 2.50 , which had a choice of 6 different versions of the CSTal engine , each with a different evaluation. It also had an engine choice called " N-Brain chooser " which randomly selected moves by choosing any of the 6 engines to make the present move. It also had the original CSTal 2.50 engine as a choice. So it had a choice of 7 engine options & came with huge opening book of approx 36meg. Really quite a slick piece of chess AI , way ahead of it's time.

[mclane]

The version you refer to had broken style feature. All the style values are so much disarranged that the engines play very weak.
It was published as a demo (pre beta of Cstal III) for other engine programmers to make their engine running in the Cstal III gui.

It cannot be used for playing strength purposes.
The programmer for implementing the styling feature from the dos Version 1 into the Windows Version 2 broke the feature in this version.
It looks like it works in the version 2.50 but in fact it is broken.

Again: dos Version has style feature.
Windows Version 2.03 has this not implemented.
Version 2.50 has it in but broken.


This was never fixed.

There was also a strange dispute between Chris w. and bob Hyatt in the rybka Forum and I think also here concerning copyright issues.
As it seems somebody used crafty parts / search in the later versions that were never published to bring the engine into parallel computing.

Even more strange somebody send bob Hyatt massive amount of source code from CSTAL project and he studied it for copyright issues.

This all sounds very mad because the company purple went bankrupt.

[karger]

I have played against it for years & found no problems with any of the engines. I have made an extensive study of each of the engines outputs & found each ones moves to be different & as equally strong as any other versions of CSTal. Each engine reaches a depth 12 to 14 in a matter of seconds on Windows 7. I have been studying & collecting chess playing software since it started in the 80's & have almost everything ever published as commercial & every freeware engine ever offered. I find CSTal 2.50 to be a true gem. Thank you for your expert opinion , I value your input.