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Maniac: Chess and Chess Variants Program A computer program

. Chess and Chess Variants Program.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

Ulysses Omycron wrote on Sat, Sep 25, 2004 11:12 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★

I was going to rate this program as Good, but the Personality feature is just great! (You just need to open Players.man to see the Original Personalities' data). I was interested in the program pieces' value (Queen at 14, Bishop/Knight at 5, Rook at 8, Pawn at 1.5); I entered those values at Rebel 12.00.02 Personality editor (As Pawn=142, Knight/Bishop=166, Rook=160, Queen=155, because Rebel multiplies the values by 1/3/3/5/9), and it actually beats Anand Personality! (The one that won the tourney for best playing personality) In a game Anand=6 Pawns, 1 Rook Vs. Maniac=4 Pawns, 2 Bishops. A score 11-10? But Maniac actually won! That's all I can say for now, I'm still experimenting.

Roberto Lavieri wrote on Wed, Sep 29, 2004 02:11 PM UTC:

Maniac, as player, is a very weak program, but it is interesting itself by its facilities to create new variants.

Greg Strong wrote on Wed, Sep 29, 2004 03:34 PM UTC:

Yes, I was excited to see this program, as I had never noticed it before and am happy to see other freeware chess-variant programs. I was disapointed, though, to see that it doesn't appear to have been updated since 2001. Too bad, this program looks to have potential. Also, too bad that it's in Visual Basic :)

Roberto Lavieri wrote on Thu, Sep 30, 2004 12:52 AM UTC:

Greg, I coincide with you, Maniac has a great potential. Visual Basic was not, surely, the best decision for this program, and additionally, I deduce that there are some problems with the search method used, looking with some care the way the program plays after a few experiments with the adjustable evaluation parameters; nevertheless, all has solutions, and it should be interesting see this program improved. I don´t know if the author has interest in improvements. The fact I know is that it was an academic work.

Clone-Of-Derek-Nalls wrote on Tue, Feb 8, 2005 06:43 AM UTC:Poor ★

Nope.

Although this program is supposed to install and run smoothly under MS
Win
2000, it gave me all sorts of error messages during its failed
installation.

Subra Nagappan wrote on Sat, Sep 23, 2023 06:44 AM UTC:

Hey, I am the author of this program. After 20 years, I found the original executable at Wayback Machine and was able to restore the download link (I created a new one). It technically works on my Surface Pro from 2012/13 that runs Windows 8 but I have no idea how it will run on other versions of Windows (I use Macs these days, and could not get it to run on my Mac with Wine but I have a M2 Mac and not an x86 one).

The engine is weak but it is still fun to see it run, and I agree VB is a bad language for it, and I can also say, beyond the GUI interface, the engine and its implementation are not that great. Unfortunately, I lost the source code but at this time I play ChessV, which seems to work great. However, it has given me some nostalgia to see this program again and play it, and I am excited to restore the download link and have it available.

I will see if modifying the personality values improves it and will post an updated version if it works. Happy to connect with others who found use with this program or made modifications to make it play a better game. Personally, I love ChessV and I play it often.

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