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Virtua Chess, (VirtuaChess)
a commercial chess program by Marc-François Baudot and Jean-Christophe Weill. It played the Aegon 1995, where it won versus David Bronstein, the WCCC 1995 in Shatin, Hong Kong, China, and won the 3rd French Computer Chess Championship in the same year. It also competed in the Grand Prix de Megeve (France) on July 8/9 1995, 11 rounds with 25 min/player, where it became the first "French player" to qualify for the Intel/PCA Rapid in Paris with a performance of 2605 and 8/11 ^[1] .

Screenshot

Virtua Chess GUI - sophisticated windowing [2]

Description

given in 1995 from the ICGA site ^[3] :

{{VirtuaChess is the commercial version of the Écume and Cumulus 2 chess programs (which finished second in the blitz tournament in Munich and which tied 2nd/3rd in the 7th World Championships in Madrid). It runs on a PC with MS-DOS and can use all of the available memory for its hash tables. It has a splendid graphical interface written by the French firm Titus [4] . Most of the chess engine is written in 32 bit assembler, and the program includes dynamic evaluation of king safety and pawn structure. It is based on PVS and uses null-move pruning. The program has perfect knowledge of KPK endgames. The evaluation function attempts to build plans whenever it recognizes important features in a position. VirtuaChess runs at 20,000 nodes per second on a Pentium 90.

Selected Games

Aegon 1995, round 4, David Bronstein - VirtuaChess ^[5]

[Event "Aegon 1995"]
[Site "The Hague"]
[Date "1995.05.01"]
[Round "4"]
[White "David Bronstein"]
[Black "VirtuaChess"]
[Result "0-1"]
 
1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5 Ne4 3.Bf4 c5 4.d5 Qb6 5.Qc1 c4 6.e3 Qa5+ 7.Nd2 c3 8.bxc3 Nxc3 9.d6 Nd5
10.Bg3 exd6 11.Nf3 Nc6 12.Bd3 Ncb4 13.O-O Nxd3 14.cxd3 Nc3 15.Nd4 b5 16.a3 h5 17.h4 Ba6
18.N2f3 Rc8 19.Qd2 d5 20.Qb2 Na4 21.Qa2 Nc3 22.Qb3 Bb7 23.Rfc1 Rh6 24.Rc2 b4 25.Qb2 Ra6
26.Rcc1 Qb6 27.axb4 Bxb4 28.Kh2 d6 29.Ng5 f6 30.Nge6 Kf7 31.f4 Rxa1 32.Rxa1 a5 33.f5 Ba6
34.Nf4 Kg8 35.Be1 Qb7 36.Qf2 Qf7 37.Qf3 Re8 38.Bd2 Bc8 39.Nxh5 Bb7 40.Nf4 Ba6 41.Qf2 Bxd3
42.Qf3 Be4 43.Qf1 Rc8 44.Qe1 Rc4 45.h5 a4 46.Qh4 Kh7 47.h6 gxh6 48.Nh5 Bxf5 49.Rf1 Bg6
50.Rxf6 Qe7 51.Qg3 Qe5 52.Nf5 Ne4 53.Qxe5 dxe5 54.Rb6 Bxd2 55.Rb7+ Bf7 56.g4 Kg6 57.Kg2
Rc2 58.Kf3 a3 59.Rb6+ Kg5 60.Nhg7 Be1 61.Ne6+ Bxe6 62.Rb2 axb2 63.Nd4 Rf2# 0-1

Game and short analyze on Lichess.org : https://lichess.org/LeMo6uv0

See also

• Cumulus
• Écume
• Virtual Chess

Forum Posts

• Some infos about Virtua (no l) Chess by Jean-Christophe Weill, rec.games.chess, April 08, 1995
• More about VirtuaChess by Jean-Christophe Weill, rec.games.chess, May 10, 1995
• Virtua Chess and E. Bacrot at Megeve Grand Prix by Marc-François Baudot, rec.games.chess, July 11, 1995 ^[6]
• Re: La Máquina Preservadora. Programas de Ajedrez by Luis a, Meca Foro, October 02, 2015 (Spanish)

External Links

• Virtua Chess' ICGA Tournaments with Virtual Chess
• Virtua Chess - YouTube Video
  

References

1. ^ Virtua Chess and E. Bacrot at Megeve Grand Prix by Marc-François Baudot, rec.games.chess, July 11, 1995
2. ^ Septober - Computerschach by Herbert Marquardt
3. ^ Virtua Chess' ICGA Tournaments together with Virtual Chess
4. ^ }}
   Titus Software
5. ^ More about VirtuaChess by Jean-Christophe Weill, rec.games.chess, May 10, 1995
6. ^ Étienne Bacrot from Wikipedia

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