Computer Voice: "Knight to D5"
Trumper: "Bishop to A5, check"
This is the only "dialogue" between the end of Merano and the start of Commie Newspapers. Freddie is playing a game of chess with a computer that has a voice feature. The subtext here is that he has to do that with a computer because Florence either doesn't play chess, or she's so poor at it that she can't help him with his game.
Later in Act 1, Anatoly will sing the following:
Get out! And get me a chess-playing second ... that is, if you want to win.
A "second" is defined as:
An assistant hired to help a player in preparation for and during a major match or tournament. The second assists in areas such as opening preparation. The second also used to assist with adjournment analysis before the practice of adjournments was largely abandoned in the 1990s.
The city of Merano hosted the 1981 World Chess Championship match between Viktor Korchnoi and Anatoly Karpov, so it's reasonable to suggest that this is the year of the match between Freddie and Anatoly. At that time, Fidelity led the industry in computer chess consoles, with its Chess Challenger series. Chess Challenger 10 looked like this:
The first Chess Challenger was written by Ron Nelson, and produced by Sidney Samole, owner of Fidelity. It ran on an Intel 8080, but was later ported to the more powerful Z80 CPU. Chess Challenger 7 saw great commercial success in 1979, but it was the merger of Dan & Kathe Spracklen's SARGON with Fidelity that led to the Chess Challenger 10:
We [Dan & Kathe Spracklen] got in contact with Sid Samole, who was the President of the company [Fidelity], and he said, “Well, come out and see us and bring your- what you got out there and show it to us.” And so we got on a plane and flew out to Miami, and showed off our program to him. And they had their chief engineer, Ron Nelson [Original writer of Fidelity Chess Challenger], look at it, and they were impressed ... They had the Chess Challenger 1, I think, out at the time, or 2, and they were looking for something better [Chess Challenger 7 was out in 1979]. Our program, that we brought with us, just shellacked their program. We had a little tournament there, in Miami, just a little, between us, on our- the one we brought with us. And they were impressed.And so they offered us a big contract, basically, to go to work for them, basically, fulltime. And we didn’t have to go to Miami. We could stay in San Diego ... And we continued to sell Sargon through Hayden [The original publisher of SARGON]. And Fidelity didn’t mind that. The said that’s cool. They didn’t see it as a competition with them.
SARGON 2 was the first microcomputer chess program that I played against regularly, on my father-in-law's TRS-80 microcomputer. SARGON 2 surprised many people, and actually defeated a six million dollar Amdahl "supercomputer" in the 1978 ACM chess tournament.
It's reasonable to assume that by 1981 anyone could easily purchase a good computer chess opponent that could travel with you to other countries. While Fidelity's Advanced Chess Challenger had a robotic voice, it didn't have the ability to "listen" to the player calling out moves. The player would have had to manually type them in. Having Freddie talk to the chess computer, "Bishop to A5, check" is a bit of artistic license. The robot voice of the Fidelity computer is pretty much what you'd expect.
One of the major themes of Chess is Duality -- Black vs. White, East vs. West, USSR vs. US, etc. This brief moment with a chess playing machine is another example. While Anatoly is asking for match preparation in the traditional (i.e., "human") way, Freddie has received match preparation in the form of technology (i.e., "non-human"). Freddie is willing to abandon having a human being help him prepare, where Anatoly insists on a human opponent (a "second"). It's AI vs. Humanity, and in the end, humanity wins out when Anatoly defeats Freddie.
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