Vintage Chess Champion Game Converted Into a Tool for Learning Jazz

If you want to play chess today but don’t have a human opponent handy, it’s easy to load up a chess program with an AI opponent that is capable of rivaling the “skill” of chess grandmasters. But that wasn’t always the case. The algorithms used by chess programs work by evaluating every possible move, up to a few moves out, and then assigning those moves a score so that the best move can be chosen. That requires the simulation of millions of possible moves — a process that could take literally days per turn in the early days of home computing. The Chess Champion MK I was a dedicated chess computer that did exactly that, and Leo Neumann has converted one into a tool for learning jazz improvisation.

The Chess Champion MK I was a chess computer released by Novag way back in 1978 that ran a CompuChess program that was outdated even at that time. It had a Fairchild F8 8-bit processing running at just 1.78MHz and a mere 256 bytes of RAM. The software had numerous problems, including the acceptance of illegal moves from the human player, and at its strongest level it would take several days to make a move. It was still very cool when new, but is laughably bad by modern standards. Neumann’s Chess Champion MK I unit, gifted to him by his girlfriend, was irreparably broken. He really only had the top faceplate and the buttons. Instead of attempting to restore it, Neumann decided to convert it into the “Jazz Champion” to practice jazz skills.

Jazz is an incredibly complex style of music, and one that is made even more challenging by the fact that improvisation is a major characteristic of live shows. Neumann’s Jazz Champion provides jazz practice through a game that has the player scoring points by selecting jazz chords that complement whatever the computer chooses to play. The software for the game is running on a Raspberry Pi Zero W and chords are played through a small pair of speakers via a WM8960 audio amplifier HAT. The computer’s chord and the player’s chord are shown on a small 220x176 character LCD screen. The player inputs their chord choice through the original keypad, with the keyboard matrix connected to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins.

Because Neumann only had the original Chess Champion MK I faceplate and keypad to work with, he had to design and 3D print a completely new enclosure in PETG. There would be room for a battery, but Neumann chose to simply use an external USB power supply. He doesn’t explain how exactly he did it, but all of the button labels were replaced to match their new functions. The program was written in Python with the Kivy UI framework, but the actual algorithms used to generate and evaluate the jazz chords are beyond our musical understanding. However, they certainly seem to work well in Neumann’s demonstration and the completed Jazz Champion device looks fantastic regardless.