Manual de Chess King 2015 | Page 23

PART 1 • A chess computer on the table it. I'm not a terrifically strong chess player, but I can eat breakfast, with one eye on a newspaper and the other on the TV, while playing BORIS and still beat it with no difficulty. Tabletop chess computers did continue to advance, though, and by the late 1980's you could buy a tabletop unit which played at masterlevel strength for a couple of hundred dollars (in 1989 money). I own two tabletop machines from that period and either of them can give me all I can handle at even a moderate level. Tabletop chess computers from this period (and many today) utilize pressure-sensitive boards, in which you press down on the piece you wish to move, pick up the piece, and press down with it on the destination square: Some (such as the one pictured) also feature LCD displays of the current board position, which are also often used to display the move the machine is currently considering. 23 chessking.com