This is a Chess Engine from fall 1994, 30 years ago, writen in C with Turbo-C IDE on MS-DOS.
It's weak, to say the least, and was too quickly developped as another planned (and paid for) better chess engine wasn't available anymore. I could not ethically explain why.
I had to own the problem and quickly develop a chess engine myself, scheduling was tight and I would personnaly thanks David Levy, whom I exchanged with thereafter, and its Computer Chess Compendium, the bible of chess programming at that time!
Still have that book on my desk. It's a treasure.
Partner was created for the first and only French chess television show "la diagnoale du fou", hosted by GM Joël Lautier, to enable beginners or casual players to play online, between humans or against this chess engine.
The goal was to have a weak automate for people to enjoy playing chess online, not get crushed.
It was mainly available through 3615 DIAGO, but also under other names such as 3615 LEFOU.
Some other French online services developped their own chess engine or used Novag Scorpio 68000 through their RJ12 serial communication port.
Chess.com was created 13 years later, Lichess 16 years later.
So 30 years laters, retrieving my old and very ugly code, I feel it's cool to have it available in open-source, but why not use it with modern Chess websites such as Lichess?
A new life for old code!
Play with Partner "PARTNER3615DIAGO" on Lichess
To use the original settings, select unrated game. Maximum 1 hour per side.