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.
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