Talk:ChessGenius

Director's Commentary. An attempt to explain all the 'jokes' thereby robbing them of any chance of being even slightly funny and provide background knowledge for non-chess-players thereby making the 'clever' references obvious and pointless. [Ed. Stupid director. Hate you.]

In chess 'checking' is when a king is attacked by opposing pieces. The actual creator of Chess Genius is Richard Lang: he did own a pet otter for a while, and he does paint. Chess software went through the whole 3D 'phase' in the early naughties, the most famous being Fritz 3D which played a match against Garry Kasparov, this 3D thing never caught on though. Castles - another name for the 'rook' chess piece. Promoted - what happens to a pawn when it reaches the other side of the board. 'Oh Essex' sounds like a mispronunciation of 'OSX' (O.S.Ten) the Mac operating system for which ChessGenius has never been available (though you can get it for 'iOS'). 'Lynx' sounds like a mispronunciation of Linux, another operating system for which ChessGenius has never been available. ChessGenius was originally written for Microsoft Dos (MS Dos), an old command line operating system. 'Stalemate' is a draw in chess, and occurs when a player has no moves but is not in check. 'Mate' is sometimes used as an abbreviation of 'Checkmate' which is when a king is trapped and attacked. In 1995 a version of ChessGenius was created to run in Microsoft Windows. A version was also created for the mobile operating system 'Android', which sounds a bit like 'Andy Roid'. 'A pawn chain' is a diagonal line of pawns: if the line is broken it will tend either to result in 'doubled pawns' (which is where one pawn is in-front of another) or 'isolated pawns' (which is where a pawn has no other pawn on the file either side of it). Steven Zaillian's film was really called 'Searching for Bobby Fischer'. Vikram Jayanti's film was really called 'Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine'. Strip chess rocks because girls suck at chess. A mechanical style is the opposite of a human style - it can't really be both. 'Taimanov' sounds a lot like a syllable anagram of 'Man of ties'. The image does actually show ChessGenius 7.2 analysing a position from the 3rd game of the Taimanov-Fischer match, but of course all the pieces have been replaced with otters. The 'Turk' was a big con where a strong human player was hidden inside a machine to make it look like the machine could play chess. A play on the two meanings of the word 'unstable' there. 'Bishop' is sometimes used to mean 'penis'. IBM's Deep Blue really was accused of cheating by Kasparov and was dismantled when IBM refused to hand over print-outs to prove it hadn't cheated. Grandmaster John Nunn is a competitive chess problem solver (and has been chess problem-solving world champion). He really did say "I must admit that I am still being humiliated by Genius" in that review, though of course he meant something slightly different. Bobby Fischer did believe that his re-match with Spassky in the early 90s was for the World Championship and as no-one subsequently defeated him in a match he would have considered himself to still be World Champion until his death. The picture shows Ken Thompson, of Unix fame, and 'Unix' sounds like 'Eunuchs'. Ken Thompson also created the first usable endgame tablebases for chess engines. Topalov really did spend a lot of money on access to a program called 'Rybka' which in Czech means 'little fish'. Rybka really was banned from chess competitions for plagiarizing two other programs 'Crafty' and 'Fruit'. David Levy was in charge of the investigation into Rybka. Fritz is a chess program. Ed Shroder is a chess programmer. 'Stockfish', 'loop', and 'Strelka' are the names of three other chess programs. Strelka was also involved in the controversy over the origins of Rybka. 'Shredder' is the name of one of the strongest chess programs of all time. Some modern chess tournaments use a 3 point system so that a win is worth '3', a draw is worth '1' and a loss is worth '0' so it would be possible to win a 3000 game match by 8997-3. Very fast chess is called 'Blitz'. A play on the double meaning of the word 'party' there. Tony Miles really did play a tournament lying down, to the consternation and confusion of his opponents. 'Otter' sounds like 'utter', 'other', 'ought to', 'hotter', and 'outa'(out of). Tony Miles does hold the record for the shortest chess review, though when he wrote it ('utter crap') he was referring to a chess book by Eric Schiller. 'Ulf' means 'wolf' in some languages and wolves have been known to eat otters. Chess software is very processor intensive. Judith Polgar was talking about computers competing, not otters. There really was a 'toiletgate' incident, in which Topalov accused Kramnik of cheating while in the toilet.