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There are THREE strong, commercially available and high quality CHESS PLAYING PROGRAMS for the ever widening range of PALM HANDHELD UNITS!
PALM units can be purchased from various places (including from PALM themselves) over the INTERNET, and the CHESS SOFTWARE is also purchased and downloaded over the INTERNET. Therefore I have no commercial involvement, but show here some details for those who are interested and perhaps thinking of buying. I have shown the web sites where trial versions can be downloaded and each product purchased. It should be noted that, for playing CHESS, the potential of the PALM handhelds has increased massively since the arrival of their much faster Tungsten ARM units, and they can now compete on equal terms with any of the programs for the Pocket PC! In fact users results, as shown below, put Palm HIARCS 9.1-9.6 beating Pocket FRITZ2 on equal hardware at various time controls... and also with Match wins against 3 strong GMs!!
You will note in the final figures which I give below that I show that Palm HIARCS 9.1-9.6 are GM strength when on 400MHz Palm units or faster. This is not a mistake, nor an exaggeration! Palm HIARCS has now beaten 3 (three) GMs in head-to-head matches, and also recently won a Tournament involving GMs and IMs! So I will start with those details to validate this view first of all:
Here are the head-to-head RESULTS, from matches using two equal-processor Palm or (for Fritz & Grandmaster) Pocket PC units. Before the Palm Tungsten ARM processors came out in 2004, the Pocket PC programs outspeeded those on the Palm where TIGER edged GENIUS for playing strength, and HIARCS was still "work in progress". To obtain maximum benefit (i.e. running speeds of between 20 and over 60 times faster!) from the ARM processors, Palm programs have to be considerably re-coded! Lang has done this for GENIUS, as has Uniacke for HIARCS, but until Theron converts the TIGER code his program will struggle when it comes to playing strength, and loses to both its competitors. In my view PALM HIARCS has the best range of FEATURES for all players beginners/hobby/club/master, with TIGER 2nd in this category, while HIARCS has easily the TOP PLAYING STRENGTH, with GENIUS 2nd.
ESTIMATED ELO RATINGS
The next thing to note is the ratings the programmers give themselves on their own websites! On a Tungsten T3 400MHz ARM processor TIGER claims a rating of 2293 Elo, GENIUS 2447 and HIARCS 2605. Based on my Selective Search rating levels I believe the following figures are more accurate... and still very impressive!
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