ChessEval Journal
About Dedicated Chess Computers
Julio
Kaplan: history of his chess programs
Written by
Hans van Mierlo
First edited | 01/26/2014 |
by MMO
Last edited |
02/04/2016 |
Additional Information:
mierlo@chesseval.com
Reference to cite:
Mierlo H, Julio Kaplan: history of his chess programs, ChessEval Journal,
9, July 2015, ChessEval.com
First of all, I will try to answer the questions people have about the programs they have inside their SciSys/Saitek chess computers.
However, I am not sure that my answers will be valid for all the versions: the versions are so numerous!
Julio
Kaplan's biography
|
Julio Kaplan is born the 25th
of July 1950 in Argentina.
He emigrated in 1963 to Puerto Rico where he was
raised.
In 1967, he won the Puerto Rico National
Championship and the same year, the World Junior
Chess Championship in Jerusalem.
Later, he went to the USA where he worked for
Autodesk.
Julio Kaplan is also former World Junior Champion of
Chess and software developer founder of Heuristic
Software.
In 1981 he wrote and coauthored chess programs with
Craig Barnes for SciSys/Saitek. Both of them
participated to the 1983 and 1985 WMCCC.
Kaplan left SciSys/Saitek in 1990.
Kaplan wrote a program named Heuristic Alpha.
He
registered it in the1991 "Humans versus Chess
Programs" Harvard Cup.
The program won against two Grand Masters
and was the highest ranked program .
However, this
program showed strategic weakness in some games.
In
fact, Kaplan never released a commercial version of this program.
One year later, he presented a new
program or more exactly, he did a new improved
version of Heuristic Alpha. He called this new
program: Socrates.
Again Kaplan went with his new program to dispute the Harvard
Cup in 1992.
Again his program was first of the
competition and reached a
positive score against Grand Masters.
Again Kaplan
did not release commercially this strong program.
In 1993, his Socrates II was ready.
Kaplan
registered it in the North American Computer Championship.
Again Socrates II was an improvement
of the Socrates program.
In 1993, Socrates II won the 23rd North American
Computer Chess Championship.
The program was hosted in an IBM PC. This
was the first and only time that a stock
microcomputer won this event, finishing ahead of
past winners Cray Blitz and HiTECH (Don
Dailey and Larry Kaufman, also creators of the
Komodo chess engine).
From the beginning of his career, Julio Kaplan did
highly selective, strategically oriented
programs, while the other programs were almost based on Brute Force
algorithms.
His way to program gave him the success
against his concurrents.. |
| |
|
Chess computers programed by Julio Kaplan and
Craig Barnes
|
• Mattel Computer Chess
• Mephisto Monaco
• Saitek Analyst
• Saitek Cavalier
• Saitek Conquistador
• Saitek Corona
• Saitek D
• Saitek D+
• Saitek D++
• Saitek Galileo
• Saitek Kasparov Blitz
• Saitek Leonardo
• Saitek Maestro
• Saitek Prisma
• Saitek Renaissance
• Saitek Simultano
• Saitek Team-Mate
• Scisys Astral
• Scisys Companion III
• Scisys Express 16K
• Scisys MK10
• Scisys Caravelle
• Scisys Sensor Chess
• Scisys Stratos
• Scisys Turbo 16K
• Scisys Turbo S-24K
• Scisys Turbo King
• Scisys Turbo King II
• Scisys Turbostar 432 KSO
• Scisys Turbostar 540
• Radio Shack Chess Champion 2150
• Radio Shack Chess Champion 2150L
• Tandy 1850
The programs of Kaplan are also present in RadioShack chess
computers, sometimes with less MegaHertz than when they were
released by Saitek/SciSys.
|
Many thanks to schachcomputer,info.
If you are interested to tune your computer
or Module, contact me,
and I will put
you in contact with the
persons able to do it. Of course,
I
cannot say how much it
will cost. You will
have to deal yourself
If you only want the
EPROMs D+/D++ or EGR, you can
contact me on this site and I will burn them for
you.
