SITE BYTE
                 _____________PRATIK KANJILAL

Kids Don’t Own The Computer

The Internet industry has been shaken and stirred by a couple of reports emanating from Jupiter Communications (www.jup.com) and Media Metrix (www.mediametrix.com), which demolish the popular perception that children are more intensive Net users than grown-ups. Teenagers spend 303 minutes online per month, it appears, while young adults clock more than twice as much. Adults top them by an added 33 per cent. They are way ahead of teens even in the number of minutes per session.

Web company CEOs who were planning to cash in on kiddies are insinuating that adults spend more time online because they are inept with computers. ‘‘D’uh, didn’t work again,’’ is the typical adult usage pattern, it is alleged, while children are naturals and work with surgical precision, cutting through Net nonsense straight to their destination. However, the studies disprove even this theory. Teens, in fact, are far more likely to wander on the Net, while adults go online to get something done.

Waving The Magic Mouse
PARENTS who think fairy tales are a pretty good way to teach children morals are past their use-by date. They should check out www.bookhugs.com, which offers free, personalised children’s books. Out there, the story happens to real children and their families, not to remote and now scarcely-credible kings and princesses. Bookhugs carries a number of templates for children’s books into which you can insert the names and relationships you want to see featured. Click a button and the story is customised for your child. More often than not, he or she is the central character. You can even send the book to friends or relations who feature in the story. Bookhugs stories have been written to inculcate the traditional virtues: patience, orderliness, the ability to share, the love of nature. A very humane way to teach your child the basics of humanity.

Dali’s Chessboard
THE tenth anniversary edition of Chessmaster, probably the world’s most popular package in its class, is a work of art. One of the options, in fact, is to play on a Dali board with pieces that might have been created by the man himself, in a pit stop between pork chops. It’s complete with flaccid clocks and liquefying kings. Just what the doctor ordered, at a time when we’re getting to read long-suppressed Nabokov on deranged grandmasters and such.

Chessmaster has a 27,000-game database, including 650 classics and over 60 opening books. Par for the course, you would say, but the program goes a wee bit beyond that. It includes personality profiles of grandmasters from Alekhine and Anand all the way down the alphabet, based on factors like the strength of their play, their contempt for a draw, their concern for the king’s safety and the importance they place on control over the centre of the board. It isn’t quite artificial intelligence, but definitely a close approximation.

To use contemporary parlance, this program has been ‘‘rich media-enabled’’. A variety of boards and sets are available, from the classic Staunton cherrywood and ironwood to Roman, Pre-Columbian and Etruscan sets. Also available are Art Deco salt and pepper sets, mechanical hardware and alphabet sets. In a nod to fantasy and science fiction, there are sets made of dinosaurs and wizards. For habitual solvers, there are sets that mimic newspaper boards. These are backed up by excellent background MIDIs, from Bach and Schubert to the Flight of the Bumblebee. Altogether, the best experience you’re likely to get on a board this side of the Internet. Statutory warning: The pieces in the Roman set scream when they die. And some of them move with sound effects suggesting Tarquin’s ravishing stride. It can be eerie and unsettling.

Chessmaster 5000
Published by Softkey UK
Distributed by BPB
Multimedia
(mail: bpb@vsnl.com)

( The writer can be reached on pratik@crosswinds.net)

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