Wolfgang Delmare: “Chat” / “Check Check” R.I.P.

[mclane]

It came to my knowledge that Wolfgang Delmare has died in August 2023.

I don’t want the computerchess community to continue business as usual without recognising this.

I met Wolfgang in germany when he participated at the “Porzer Open” with his unbelievable engine “Chat”.

Wolfang was a huge guy with black hair. A giant.
But a very polite and friendly guy.

He told me he worked in a nuclear power plant.
And said his engine chat had no search tree but only extensions or evaluation.

He gave me a copy of “chat” and it was like a text adventure.
Unbelievable things happened while it computed.

The funny thing was that it created positions on the chess board you could NOT tell if he position is from up to top or from left to right of any other direction. This was maybe difficult for the engine, but it was even more “complicate” for the human players.

They sat in front of the board, their ears were dark red and they had their hands in their hair trying to find out a way from the chaotical position.

I then tried to begin a dialogue with Wolfgang.
He began another engine called check check and sold it commercially via Gambit Soft.
It had a very unique and pleasant graphical DOS GUI that looked like granite buttons.
And it even came with an endgame database (! At that time unique) on floppy discs.

Check check played stronger on DOS then chat.
But it often failed in test suites such as bratko kopec or bednorz toenissen or others.

We then considered WHY this is the case.
We also talked about its passive playing style.

Wolfgang as i said was a very friendly and polite person, shy , told me he thinks the pawns should not walk over the 4th rank, so this would guarantee white at least a draw.

I disagreed and the next weeks were a dialogue where i tried to explain to him that it is not enough to hold the own pieces in the own field if you want to lead.


He participated on world computer chess championships with “chat” and “check check” and enjoyed it.

https://www.chessprogramming.org/WCCC_1986#Video

https://www.chessprogramming.org/WCCC_1986
https://www.chessprogramming.org/WMCCC_1987
https://www.chessprogramming.org/WMCCC_1988

https://www.chessprogramming.org/Experimental


He even took his girl friend with him.
And i remember his keyboard was a very small keyboard. That was at least a few years before the small keyboard were “modern”.
It looked strange if you remember the huge person he was.

In the last years wolfgang delmare was still showing great interests in computerchess.
But also in doing photography.
His website with amazing pictures he did on his NIKON stunning.

https://www.delmare.de/

Take a look at yourself all those beautiful images wolfgang took with his NIKON.


If you take a look on his DOS engine “check check” you will find that his chess engine and his photography is both the same aesthetically level.

In the last months before he died we spoke about making check check UCI engine.
But he was against it.
Somehow he said, making “check check” a pure TEXT engine is something he does not really like. He prefers bringing a new engine out in a new windows GUI instead putting it as an UCI engine in someone’s GUI.

We came to no result on this.

And it was short after the summer my emails suddenly were not answered anymore. It took until October until i found out why.

Please, don’t let us forget Wolfgang.
Wherever you are.

I will miss you.

R.I.P.

https://www.chessprogramming.org/Wolfgang_Delmare

[Graham Banks]

Nice write-up, Thorsten.

Sorry that you lost a good friend.

[Alexander Schmidt]

Check Check was one of my first chess programs I bought and I remember how exciting it was to see the first tablebases at work. Somehow sad that Check Check did not make it to an UCI engine, but on the other hand I can understand Mr. Delmare, Check Check was more of a beautiful GUI than an exciting engine.

Thanks Thorsten for letting is know and condolences to his family and friends.

R.I.P.

[Frank Quisinsky]

Hi Alex,

yes, CheckCheck comes with 5 or 6 3.5 inch discs.
I helps Gambit-Soft a lot at this time and we are searching such programs like CheckCheck.

CheckCheck was a commercial program.
Inside are "I believe" the first available endgame databases.
A bit weaker as SibChess or Now but the endgame was a sensation.

Very nice and stable GUI with a lot of interesting and own ideas.
I had also a contact to him at this time.
A very friendly programmer and after all I remember infected with the RexChess virus.

Bad news, every month such news from good known computer chess people.



Best
Frank