ChessMachine
chess computer
The ChessMachine was a chess computer sold between 1991 and 1995 by TASC (The Advanced Software Company). It was unique at the time for incorporating both an ARM2 coprocessor for the chess engine on an ISA card which plugged into an IBM PC and a software interface running on the PC to display a chess board and control the engine.
The ISA card was sold with a CPU running at either 16 MHz or 32 MHz, and 128 KB, 512 KB, or 1 MB of onboard memory for transposition tables. This made economic sense at the time of introduction because mainstream PCs were only running from 10 MHz to 25 MHz.
Two engines were sold with the card: The King by Johann de Koning and Gideon by Ed Schröder. Gideon was famed for winning two World Computer Chess Championships on this hardware. The King later became the engine used in the popular Chessmaster series of chess programs.
TASC later incorporated the technology into a dedicated unit, sold from 1993 to 1997. There were two models, the R30 and R40, running at 30 MHz and 40 MHz respectively, and having 512 KB and 1 MB of transposition tables, respectively.
The SmartBoard, a wooden sensory board, was connected to the units, which were in tiny boxes approximately the size of chess clocks.
“ChessMachine” enters the record as chess computer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what ChessMachine, chess and computer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 19, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q5093286. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1991, 1995, 1993 and 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “ChessMachine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.