Test conditions: Concerning the idea behind this test take a look at the main page for this test.
The games will be played with the so called tournament time control which means each side has to play 40 moves within 120 minutes and the rest of the game has to be played within 60 minutes each side. So a game cannot last longer than 6 hours.
The games will be played on 2 PCs. Each match will be played with 20 games.

Chessmaster 9000 plays on an AMD Athlon 1800+ (1533MHz) with 64MB hash (256MB RAM), the opponents will use an Intel Celeron 1539MHz (without any danger or problems overclocked from 1400MHz) with 200MB hash (320MB RAM). Chessmaster 9000 plays with the WB2UCI-Adapter by Odd Gunnar Malin from 16.03.2002 in Shredder Classic. As opening book Chessmaster 9000 uses Brian Kostick's book. After each match the move weights and preferences will be cleared so that there are equal conditions for each match.
Altogether Chessmaster 9000 will play 100 games in this test (20 games vs. each opponent). With a maximum of 6 hours each match the whole test will take 25 days. After that some more detailed facts will be evident to estimate the style and the strength of this program.
I expect a performance of about 52% +/- 3% and I am curious how close to reality this guess will be.

Additional remark: If new programs or new program versions will be released during this test, maybe I will add them to Chessmaster's opponent list.