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(August 2003) Want to play chess against a World Champion? Every day? On your own schedule? Our About Chess article on 'Where to play chess' (see the link box in the upper right corner) hinted how to do this : play against your own computer. Software available for your computer may have won or finished near the top in a recent World Computer (or Microcomputer) Chess Championship.

What software is available? It depends on the kind of computer you have.

We checked out a few of the Product:Equipment online retailers (also listed under Subjects on the left of every About Chess page) and determined that there are many primary developers of chess playing software. Some products are supported on multiple platforms and some are targeted for a specific platform.

We started with commercial products for Windows, today the most popular computing platform in the world, and released a new Buyer's Guide article, Before You Buy Chess Playing Software for Windows (see the link box again). What about Macs, Unix, Palms, cell phones, game machines, and other handheld platforms? Watch for a companion article on commercial chess playing software for the non-Windows world! Also watch for an article on non-commercial chess playing software, another category in this incredibly rich area of computer chess.

Our first list of commercial products for Windows had twelve names. An About, Inc. Before You Buy page has space for only eight topics or products. What to do? We ran some simple tests on popularity -- number of Web page references and number of retailers offering a product -- to select eight products for our new About Chess page.

While we were doing this we determined that Chess Tiger, Rebel, and ChessPartner are related to each other, so we covered them all under the Chess Tiger product. That whittled our short list down to ten products, which still meant that two could not be covered.

In the interest of fairness and completeness, here are links for the two products missing from the main Before You Buy page.

• Young Talents is a collection of seven different engines in a Fritz 6 interface. It seems not to have been upgraded to a later Fritz interface.
• Chess System Tal Version 2 was a Windows program by Chris Whittington. Development has stopped and the main site (www.oxford-softworks.com) gives a 'DNS lookup error'.

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