CHISSWare stands for Computerized Human Intelligence Simplified in Soft-Ware: a hypothetical project based on Vecsyma. It is powered by the hierarchical model of how the brain works (the cerebral cortex) described in the book On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. VECSyma stands for Vertices, Edges, and Character Streams. Chissware sees using a grid of vertices connected by horizontal, vertical, and diagonal edges. Half of the vertices are each connected to 8 adjacent vertices (including 4 using diagonal edges), and the other half are connected to 4 adjacent vertices (w/o any diagonal edges). Chissware paints by toggling edges on and off. Chissware moves the mouse by moving it along edges in order to select the current vertex. Chissware hears using a stream of printable ASCII characters. Chissware talks by outputting a stream of printable ASCII characters. Every word consists of one or more syllables, or sequences of alphanumeric characters, separated by a single symbol character (not a space or alphanumeric character). Every vertex is associated with an optional string of printable ASCII characters of no more than 256 characters. The tilde character (~) has special meaning: followed by a sequence of letters, the tilde indicates a markup code such as bold or list item. Followed by some other character, the tilde closes the previously unclosed tilde-markup code. To escape the tilde character, use ~t~.
Chissware maintains a primary picture buffer consisting of a 3 x 3 grid of monochrome pixels for each vertex in its grid of vertices. Colored pixels are stored in lists of coordinate pairs. Each coordinate pair (or list of pairs) is associated with a color: a number of arbitrary size. Chissware can maintain an arbitrary number of picture buffers, each buffer of arbitrary size.