OS/2 Chess 3.0

I was recently working with OS/2 Warp 4 (as one does) when I noticed that it includes a built-in chess game. I play chess from time to time and thought that this would be a great opportunity to teach “the machine” a lesson, especially with everything happening with AI right now. I mean, this game is literally 30 years old.

It did not go well. I played three games and I lost three games. It seems that “casual chess player” is no match for a 1996 chess game. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised: IBM (the company behind this game) went on to build Deep Blue and defeat the World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov the following year (1997).

Gameplay

The graphics are not good and the default angled board makes it surprisingly hard to read the position. You can rotate it but it doesn’t help. Still, nice to see that there was someone pushing for a 3D view in the 90s.

The game is fairly complete: Ctrl + Shift + T to go back a move, TCP/IP multiplayer, save and load, move notations and even a built-in introduction to chess.

Something cool was seeing the CPU utilization: you can see at the top of the screenshot the plateaus when the machine is thinking (CPU close to 100%) and the deep valleys when I’m thinking.

TL;DR

Turns out 1996 chess is still very capable. Message received.