Ever since Leopard came out, I have heard the fanboys rage. Which is the better, Vista or Mac OS? Which is a blatant rip-off from the other? Which is faster, stronger, lighter? If only there were a quantifiable way to prove, now and forever, which OS is the One OS To Rule Them All.
Fortunately, I have found the way.
Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate come with Chess Titans. Leopard comes with the Chess App. If set the Mac Chess App to play as white, and the Vista Chess Titans to play as black, and I shuttle the moves back and forth between the two computers, then we shall see which OS is can conquer the other upon the mental battlefield of chess.
I did this once before, you’ll remember, pitting Vista against Tiger, and Tiger won soundly. Well, it’s time for a rematch! How will Vista fare against Tiger’s successor?
For our combatants, we have a PC running Vista Ultimate, with a Core 2 Duo T6600 processor running at 2.4 Ghz with 2 gigabytes of RAM. The Mac is running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.1, with a single-core 1.8 Ghz G4 processor and 3 gigabytes of RAM. For the ultimate battle, I set the difficulty sliders on both chess programs to maximum, and then I let the struggle begin.
Because I set the difficulty slider to maximum (and only moved the pieces when I had a free moment), this took the better part of three days. It took quite a long time for the computers to grind out the moves. On the PC, it quite commonly maxed out one of the processor cores.
On the Mac, it wasn’t uncommon for the Chess App to use about 90% of the processor’s time. In fact, sometimes it stayed at 90 for so long the fan kicked up to a higher level.
But in the end, Leopard prevailed. And convincingly. Not quite so lopsided a victory as Tiger won, but still a victory nonetheless.
You can see the same thing here on the Mac side (Chess Titans might have lost, but it does have prettier graphics).
So it has been proven. The Mac has overpowered the PC at last. I expect Microsoft will go out of business any day now, and the great migration to the all-conquering Mac will begin presently.*
Still, to be fair, the Mac uses a modified version of GNU Chess, which has been in continual development since 1984 or so. Chess Titans is only a few years old at best, and its chess engine obviously lacks the power of GNU Chess.
But. Windows 7. Rematch!
(The complete game transcript is here, for those who are interested.)
-JM
*Right.
Cool thing to try, it’s a shame that the leopard chess graphics are so bad as the engine itself is great!
The GNU engine coupled with the Vista graphics would be something to behold, I agree. Next up I think I’ll pit Chess App against the REAL GNU chess, which has even UGLIER graphics.
Um…just curious…what programs are running on the two machines? In the end, that is the deciding factor. Not all are by any means created equal…my son has beaten his old Radio Shack computer, for instance, on almost every level…but bought the big nice tournament model two-hundred buck set and hasn’t gotten past level 3…
Fritz would be the best battle. Fritz against Fritz loaded on the different operating systems.
D
Do you mean what applications were running simultaneously while I did the chess game, or what chess software I used?
If you mean the former, then I don’t really recall; I did this over the course of a week, and I had Outlook, Word, Firefox, Media Player, iTunes, Nmap, Access, Terminal Services Client, and a dozen other apps opened and closed in that time.
If you mean the latter, then Chess.app (dervied from GNU Chess, I believe) on the Mac, and Chess Titans (the included chess game) on the Vista machine.
Fritz vs. Fritz would be cool, I agree. Next up, though, I think I’m going to pit Leopard’s Chess.app against actual GNU Chess on a Linux box. It will be interesting to see which one comes out on top.
For a real test, wouldn’t you have to play multiple games? I did mean the chess software. It seems to me that the application itself, and not the computing power behind it, is the telling factor, unless you limit the machine on how long it gets to “think” before moving. All chess apps, in other words – not created even remotely equal.
I’ll be interested to see how the Linux box performs. I’m a Microsoft Engineer, but I work because of them, not for them, so I have no particular attachment to Vista. Don’t hate it, don’t love it.
My buddies with Macs are all happy – until there are problems. The problems they face – the expense and difficulty in getting around them – seem much more demanding on pocket-book and brain than the Microsoft crowd…
Still…I love those commercials…
D
A more thorough test would require more games. And I also would have to let Chess Titans start as white and Mac’s Chess.app start as black; white always does get a slight advantage, which can compound if played properly.
I did set both programs to maximum difficulty with no time limits for this particular match.
I quite agree about Macs; they’re great right up until they stop working. Then it’s time to whip out the checkbook. And getting Macs to work properly with Active Directory and Windows Server storage servers has always been a pain.
LOL