Purple: What's it matter if the game is over? A little late to get help, ain't it? It certainly isn't cheating by any definition of the word that I know of. It's the same as looking over a game you've already played. One of the things that the Chess playing machine do is used old games and data bases to look up and compare a position in the case that it's been played before. That to me is cheating, but that is allowed in tournaments where programs are permitted to play. This is one thing that makes Sumerian's type of program different from a lot of others is that it plays on the fly and just wings its moves. It's still a machine, but it is a different approach to programming.