Chris Whittington's Chess System Tal!

[supersharp77]

Thank You Thorsten Czub!! Man what a fantastic post! copies of Chess System Tal (windows) I and II are available on the net.....

http:XXX.XXX.htm

enjoy!! AAR


Moderation: This is commercial software and therefore links making it freely available are forbidden here.

[S.Taylor]

Yes indeed. It was about Fun. It emulated the style of tal, so that human chess players playing against it would enjoy the style.

It actively created mate nets (it was capable to see mate via evaluation without using search) confronted the opponent with many pieces hanging/en prise and the dos version came with massive overview of information and a powerful database feature.
It could search for the position and other stuff. You could make a book out of the database. You could break the evaluation into the many functions while it is computing !!!! Or you could click on the end of the main line and the engine would move the pieces on board so that you see the position in that move of the move line. You could tune EACH evaluation function with a slider or each search feature with a switch and save/load the styles. It supported external chess boards and auto player and also came with auto-test-suite feature.
You were able to reduce playing strength and and and.

There was almost no feature I can remember that was NOT implemented in the CSTAL dos version. Different piece sets, 2d, 3d (with main line And tournament clocks). You could input all kind of time controls, all kind of clocks (Fischer/bronstein). Tournament/blitz/ exact time.
It supported table bases different hash sizes under dos. You could setup for children or serious strong chess club players. It had a face showing the positions with either a smile or a crying face, you could watch the SEARCH tree in several graphs. It handled variations in game/database and fen/pgn support. You could comment games. You could even DRAW with the mouse on the chessboard to shop certain aspects of the position.
We put everything into this program we could imagine. You could do many commands with intuitive keys beeing pressed. We planned all this in details and the GUI programmers made it real. You could save the whole sendinfos on HDD to later find out about the games, e,g, when starting and auto playing session or a test-suite run.

I would say CSTAL dos was amazing from the features.
It took us years to implement all those features with several programmers,
A team of programmers was involved doing the graphics. Chris cared for the chess parts and the programming teams had to be coordinated.

I am happy that we can emulate dos on the latest windows systems so I can still use CSTAL dos on big pcs or even on tablet pcs.

1).Would you say the same could be made today with a few hundred elo more?
2).Or would you say that everything good about CSTal 2 already exists in top programs now?
3).Or would you say there is no need for it because it could only make things weaker now, whilst when it was invented, there were things that were not yet strong in computer chess, and cstal2 made a few things strong, in some cases?

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

Yes indeed. It was about Fun. It emulated the style of tal, so that human chess players playing against it would enjoy the style.

It actively created mate nets (it was capable to see mate via evaluation without using search) confronted the opponent with many pieces hanging/en prise and the dos version came with massive overview of information and a powerful database feature.
It could search for the position and other stuff. You could make a book out of the database. You could break the evaluation into the many functions while it is computing !!!! Or you could click on the end of the main line and the engine would move the pieces on board so that you see the position in that move of the move line. You could tune EACH evaluation function with a slider or each search feature with a switch and save/load the styles. It supported external chess boards and auto player and also came with auto-test-suite feature.
You were able to reduce playing strength and and and.

There was almost no feature I can remember that was NOT implemented in the CSTAL dos version. Different piece sets, 2d, 3d (with main line And tournament clocks). You could input all kind of time controls, all kind of clocks (Fischer/bronstein). Tournament/blitz/ exact time.
It supported table bases different hash sizes under dos. You could setup for children or serious strong chess club players. It had a face showing the positions with either a smile or a crying face, you could watch the SEARCH tree in several graphs. It handled variations in game/database and fen/pgn support. You could comment games. You could even DRAW with the mouse on the chessboard to shop certain aspects of the position.
We put everything into this program we could imagine. You could do many commands with intuitive keys beeing pressed. We planned all this in details and the GUI programmers made it real. You could save the whole sendinfos on HDD to later find out about the games, e,g, when starting and auto playing session or a test-suite run.

I would say CSTAL dos was amazing from the features.
It took us years to implement all those features with several programmers,
A team of programmers was involved doing the graphics. Chris cared for the chess parts and the programming teams had to be coordinated.

I am happy that we can emulate dos on the latest windows systems so I can still use CSTAL dos on big pcs or even on tablet pcs.

1).Would you say the same could be made today with a few hundred elo more?
2).Or would you say that everything good about CSTal 2 already exists in top programs now?
3).Or would you say there is no need for it because it could only make things weaker now, whilst when it was invented, there were things that were not yet strong in computer chess, and cstal2 made a few things strong, in some cases?

I'll go with your third statement Shimon on any given day....
Dr.D

[S.Taylor]

What needs to happen is ChrisW gets CSTal back and makes it UCI, iOS and Android compatible!

Thanks,

Sean

Why? would it be so special if it would be reactivated to todays standards? Was it something really ingenius and unimitable?

If you have to ask this question you know squat about computer chess!

You're slow!

[S.Taylor]

Yes indeed. It was about Fun. It emulated the style of tal, so that human chess players playing against it would enjoy the style.

It actively created mate nets (it was capable to see mate via evaluation without using search) confronted the opponent with many pieces hanging/en prise and the dos version came with massive overview of information and a powerful database feature.
It could search for the position and other stuff. You could make a book out of the database. You could break the evaluation into the many functions while it is computing !!!! Or you could click on the end of the main line and the engine would move the pieces on board so that you see the position in that move of the move line. You could tune EACH evaluation function with a slider or each search feature with a switch and save/load the styles. It supported external chess boards and auto player and also came with auto-test-suite feature.

Does all this mean that it saw many positions which COULD theoretically be created with the pieces on the board, and then went to work trying to find if any of it could be put into practice?