[1] It was designed for MS-DOS while Garry Kasparov reigned as world champion, whose involvement and support was its key allure.

[3] Julio Kaplan, chessplayer, computer programmer, and owner of the company 'Heuristic Software', first developed Heuristic Alpha in 1990–91.

[4] The original version evolved into Socrates with the help of other chess players and programmers including Larry Kaufman and Don Dailey, who, later, were also developers of Kasparov's Gambit.

[7] During the course of the championship Socrates II, which was running on a stock 486 PC, defeated opponents with purpose-built hardware and software for playing chess, including HiTech[8] and Cray Blitz.

The patched version ran at about 75% of the speed of Socrates II which was quite an achievement considering the whole functionality of the software was sharing the same computer resources.

[10] In 1993, it competed in the Harvard Cup (six humans versus six programs) facing grandmasters who had ratings ranging from 2515 to 2625 ELO.

[21] Creation of personalities enables five adjustable characteristics in percentage (0-100%)—strength, orthodoxy, creativity, focus and aggressiveness—which define, besides its style, its Elo rating.

[27] First intention was using Heuristic Alpha as Gambit's base, but unexpected good performance of Socrates II in tournaments made of it the final choice.