Rchess Read Me

RChess 2.2.2 • Fills a market gap, by being easily beaten at its lower levels. Unkind people have suggested that this feature applies at the higher levels too. • Usually beats its programmer on level 4, often on level 3, and occasionally on level 2. • Is given away free, gratis, without charge, and for nothing. Nor are you required to pay for it. • Examines up to 1500 moves per second on LCIII; up to 3600 per second on Quadra 650. The natural awe with which naive people regard these numbers should be tempered by the fact that most of the moves examined are stupid ones that no human player would contemplate at all. Also, internationally acclaimed chess computers examine 300000+ moves per second. • Is written in FutureBasic II, with many of the search routines in assembly language. • Has received perceptive critical comment: "It plays chess as though it was playing draughts". Instructions • Minimum memory requirement (as set in the Finder's Get Info window) is about 720K. Memory allocated in excess of this is used for the transposition table to increase speed of searching. An allocation of at least 1.8 MB is recommended. • Move pieces either by clicking on the piece then on the destination, or by dragging the piece to its destination. • The 'Score' displayed at upper right after each move is a crude indicator of how well or poorly RChess thinks it is doing. The score is dictated mainly by material balance, with conventional piece values: pawn=100, knight=324, bishop=348, rook=500, queen=900. • By default RChess consults a small library of opening moves. If a match is found with the current position it plays the stored 'book' move immediately. If there is more than one book move, RChess picks one at random. As will quickly become clear to the informed observer, the intention behind this feature is not to secure an advantage by encyclopaedic knowledge of openings, but merely to provide felicitous variation in the openings played. • An inconspicuous mini-menu to the right of the Play menu contains two commands: "Hint" and "Move now". • The command "Modify board position" in the Play menu permits rearrangement of pieces. After rearrangement, select "Continue play" to accept the new piece placings, or "Revert board position" to return to the original position. • The commands "White to play and mate" and "Black to play and mate" in the Play menu put RChess into an efficient mate-problem-solving mode which will find a mate (if one exists in 10 moves or fewer). Exit from this mode by selecting "New game" from the File menu, or "Move now" from the mini-menu. • RChess can run in the background, so that you may work with another application while RChess continues to think about its move. Angry bug reports (in English please) or extravagant praise (in any language) may be directed to:- robert.purves@stonebow.otago.ac.nz Robert Purves Pharmacology Department Medical School University of Otago PO Box 913 Dunedin New Zealand Version history • ≤1.15 Various b…