This chess computer arrived in 2007 from deepest Siberia, from close to the Kazakhstan and Mongolian borders. At first it was a bit of a mystery. The person who sold it thought that it had been manufactured in 1988 and that 5000 had been made. He knew very little else. The manual is in Russian Cyrillic script and therefore of limited assistance to me, though the functions required to play a game of chess are not too difficult to work out.

Although of a bigger and heavier design and metal construction, its closest Western counterpart would be the Great Game Machine. It is designed to accept cartridges that play different games. It came with the Chess and Kalak (a version of Mancala) cartridges. Checkers and backgammon are other possibilities and altogether 12 games and a chess player test program are listed in Radio magazine 1983 No.9.

Since the Intellect-02 arrived I have learned a bit more about it and other Russian chess computers so this update of the webpage is long overdue.

continued below....

Details of Russian manufactured chess computers have certainly been hard to come by. In recent years examples have eventually appeared on Ebay but even so little is known about most of them. The story seems to start with two Russian made chess computers which were first exhibited at the All-Russian Exhibition Centre in Moscow in 1983 and 1984. These were Intellect-01 and Intellect-02. Intellect-01 played only chess and appears to have been built in small numbers. There is a picture of one below. Intellect-02 which is the subject of this webpage was built to play a number of board games, including chess, using program cartridges similar to an early video games console. Intellect-02 was intended for mass production. It was based on the KR580VM80A processor, a Soviet Intel 8080 clone. It is thought that around 8000 were made between March 1986 and 1992. I have no idea how many cartridges were produced. My Intellect-02 has serial number 4288 and the chess cartridge serial number 4315 both being dated November 1988. The chess cartridges were sold in a box with an instruction manual but no chess pieces.

I expected the Intellect-02 to be a weak player at chess but nevertheless an interesting Russian opponent. However this is where the big letdown arrived. The 1988 Intellect-02 chess cartridge is in fact an exact clone of the Fidelity Chess Challenger 3 (CC3). In every test game I have played against the CC3 and Intellect-02 they have played exactly the same moves when set on the same level. The four chess control buttons BB (EN - Enter), CT (CL - Clear/Change Level), BN (DM - Double Move) and Cb (RE - Reset) perform exactly the same functions as they do on the CC3. The Intellect-02 is usually 10-20% slower to respond. Thanks to a quirk of the Intellect-02 manual I now know that both machines will accept castling whether you input the king move or the rook move first.

The Intellect-01 appears to be extremely rare. In fact until 2018 there was little evidence of its existence at all. Intellect-02 seems to be a little easier to find within Russia but very rare elsewhere. Some of the Russian developed Elektronikas and a number of Eastern Block clones of Western chess computers appear more often in collections and on Ebay.
 

Four program cartridges. Kalak 2664 and 4576
Chess 4315 (3-level) and 7554 (4-level).
 

The only known example (?) of an Intellect-01.
Sold on Ebay in 2018.