Here is a nice little fairy tale, especially written for Thorsten
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The year is 19xx. We have a brilliant engineer who knows manufacturing and who has sufficient programming knowledge to be able to program the turning “on and off” of switches and responses to key press impulses on other gadgets. One day he meets with a man who has a business and money and they discuss business opportunities in the new electronics industry.

At the same time one of them if not both are aware of all the hype around a famous man and his bet about chess programs never being able to beat him. They are also aware of the large public interest for computer chess.
And the engineer says: “I bet I could build a table chess computer!” and the financer says: “Well if you could, then we would both become extremely rich and famous! And I would finance this immediately if you can do this!”

So the engineer goes home and starts working on this project. And he works hard designing on paper how the table computer should look. LCD display, signals and responses to key presses and small chess board. The engineer is happy, he has a computer designed! Yippee! But, now he has to develop a chess program and he begins working on this all alone in his spare time because he still has a 9 to 5 job to go to in order to make money for his family.

After extensive research, the engineer sees that his idea for a table chess computer is not exactly unique and he sees that there are many other companies also already working hard on this.

This knowledge adds to his pressure of having to find a way to develop a chess program as quickly as possible all alone and in his spare time. And it is a big problem because he knows that it has taken whole teams of really intelligent and brilliant students and professors in Universities more than 10 years to develop their programs and the code for this is not accessible to the public and he has only 6 months to do all this from scratch. So he thinks and he researches and worries about this every day.

One day, he reads an article about a hand-made computer and a program that you can manually key into this computer! At first he is a little disappointed, since technically after all he might not be the first to invent one. But he soon forgets his disappointment because after all this computer is not the same! It is not a table chess computer!

So he takes this program, studies it day and night after work and weekends, pulls it apart and completely changes it and behold it works!

But just like the original that he copied, it is not perfect, but it now looks very different and plays better, and no one will be able to tell. However, it still cannot promote pieces, it cannot checkmate, the key inputs although very much changed and better than the original, still does not follow standard chess notations.

He needs more time but he has no more time, the financier is impatient because he is worried about the competition and he wants to be first and not second.

So the product is launched before it is ready, upgrades are promised to disappointed customers, but who cares the world has a chess computer!

Viele gruesse,

Nick