What got you into computer chess?

[DBTundra]

What got you into computer chess? Battle Chess, a love of programming, and no chess set.

[jdart]

My dad taught me to play chess when I was 10. I was a pretty active player up until I finished high school. I won the high school championship, although I was never very high rated.

Fast forward to the 1980s. I was in grad school and was doing some software consulting work and independent software development on the side. I was aware of some of the early computer chess work and had played around with Gnuchess, Borland's Turbo Chess and a few other programs. I did some research on the topic of chess programming (back in those days, that meant visiting a university library and reading some articles), and wrote a really crappy program of my own in Modula-2 (the UI was pretty decent for that era but the engine was bad). A little later I was starting to teach myself programming for Microsoft Windows, then a very new technology. I got the idea of writing a chess program in C++, mostly to practice my Microsoft coding skills. So that became the first version of Arasan (UI + engine in one package, like its Modula-2 predecessor, although it had no code in common with that).

--Jon

[BrendanJNorman]

What got you into computer chess?

Chessmaster 3000 and the multiple GM personalities it had.

[WinPooh]

Psion Chess, Chessmaster 2100 and Mephisto-Europe computer. And those strange program for PDP-11 in my school - with text interface and cryptic old English notation...

[Graham Banks]

The store where my father was sales manager started selling a couple of types of dedicated chess computers.

[RubiChess]

I got a Commodore VIC 20 and this http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/ ... -II-Chess/ game cartridge when I was 13 years.
I learned some chess basics at the same age from a book.
Later I wrote some "four in a row" program on a C64 at age of 16 and had some lessons about gaming theory in university at age of 22.

Then I lost contact for half of my life before someone at work pointed me to TCEC and chessprogramming scene when I asked him about a post he made at facebooks TCEC page.

Andreas

[S.Taylor]

What got you into computer chess? Battle Chess, a love of programming, and no chess set.

I used to think it was the closest to human thing you could get in machine form.
I have never yet come across another person who felt the same way as me.

I was also crazy over being able to know what a grandmaster would suggest in some positions.

Again, no one EVER felt like me. As far as i know.

Also, i was longing to see world famous combinations that made history, come out of my own bed room (ie my own private room).

[reflectionofpower]

Chess Challenger 1,3, Novag 1.6, Mach III, then the software.

[A Distel]

What got you into computer chess? Battle Chess, a love of programming, and no chess set.

The ability of computers to outperform humans!

[mclane]

MK1, mkv, Mephisto 1