The Amiga definitely has more personality. Midway through a duel between Real Chess 3D and the Chess Master 2000, Simpson acknowledges the graphics are “not quite so interesting.”īut within three minutes and 46 seconds, there’s a surprise. “Real Chess 3D (ELO: “Up to 1900”) versus “Chessmaster 2000” (2000), as well as “Hiarcs Chess Explorer” (Up to over 3200) versus “Sargon III” (which at least one beat a chess master rated at 2200). It’s time to bump up the ELO ratings, as Simpson stages two other Mac-versus-Amiga battles: “I think all we can do is move on to two different games, and see if with more intelligent games on both sides we get a better result.”
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Lady Fractic: “I’m seeing the end of the game coming…”Īfter 38 minutes of playtime, the Mac wins, leaving Simpson a little disappointed. “I thought the Mac would’ve slaughtered the Amiga by now,” Simpson says at one point, “but they’re actually having an involved, pretty good game of chess.” (“Did you see how fast she responded? She was like, ‘I’m going to murder you.”) But the lean vintage programming seems to be holding its own. Soon they’re getting invested in the outcomes - and the triumphant animations of the “Battle Chess” queen.
For castling, the rook turns into a kind of stone golem - clomping to its new square before reverting back into a rook. And how does a pawn beat a more powerful knight? “He hit him in the crotch!” But the two watchers gasp when that knight actually beheads the poor bishop. Instead of jumping over pieces, he elbows his way through the other pieces as they move to let him pass through. Watching the game unfold, Perifractic and Lady Fractic note that the knight chess piece appears an actual knight - but with no horse. The chess-playing program being used, “Battle Chess” displays a giant icon of “The Thinker,” except it’s sitting on a computer. Back in the Mac chess app, Lady Fractic calls it “Much less violent.”īack on the Amiga, there’s a wait for the next move.
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He also reminds his YouTube audience about Wirth’s Law: that our bloating software is getting slower more rapidly than our hardware is getting faster.īut soon the bout has commenced, in a video displaying both chess boards. It was an optional update, Simpson later concedes in the comments, though “Still, there’s something nice about not being offered updates.”
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“You may need to quit and open Chess again after download completes.” The Mac chess app displays a pop-up warning that a 1.2GB download is required to enable its speech recognition features. “Logic would dictate that the Mac would still win, because it could get more thinking done in the same amount of time, even with the same ELO rating.”īut first, they encounter a very 2020 problem. First Simpson tries pitting the Mac’s stock chess app (ELO: over 1,600) against the AI behind the flashy 3D animations of Battle Chess on the Amiga (ELO: 1500 first released in 1988).
To make it a fair fight, Simpson stages matches where the skill levels of both programs are set at comparable levels, using a long-standing chess metric called the ELO rating. “In theory, the Mac will slaughter the Amiga,” Simpson explained, “because it’s faster and its AI is smarter.” Riffing on the advantages of modernity, he points out that today “Even a Tesla can play you at chess while you wait at the traffic lights.”Īssisting Simpson in the video is “Lady Fractic,” sitting in front of the MacBook, and together they enter the responses from one chess program as their own moves into the other program. But what if he could pit a 1987 Amiga against a modern computer, say a MacBook? “Unfortunately, Garry was unavailable for my little rematch video,” Simpson quips. In a pleasant voice with a slightly British accent, Simpson tells his viewers that the Amiga-versus-Mac competition was partly inspired by that epochal moment in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer beat the world’s human chess champion, Garry Kasparov. But mixed in with the competition and the nostalgia was a chance to look back over three decades of differences, considering changes in the way we view our software - and each other. And there was at least one big surprise, as YouTuber Christian Simpson staged four bouts (using six different chess-playing applications) for the 58,900 subscribers on his “ Retro Recipes” YouTube channel. The big showdown appeared on YouTube this month, offering a glimpse at what’s changed - and what hasn’t - as our technology hurtles into the future. What happens when a vintage computing enthusiast stages a chess-playing competition between a modern Mac and a 1980s-era Amiga Commodore computer?
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