Does ChessMaster XI really take that long to "think"?

I'm playing ChessMaster XI and I noticed that when you're playing against the CPU, which consists of various fictitious profiles of different ratings among whose you can choose one as your opponent, during the game, no matter what virtual opponent you choose, the CPU will take some time to think on his next move. Sometimes this thinking can take more than 1 minute.

So I was wondering, just wondering really, if this time is actually necessary for the CPU to process his moves or if this is just a feature to make the experience of playing against the CPU the most similar to playing against a human opponent.

To be honest, if this is just a feature I like it because it really resembles a human player and I'm training to play against human after all (so maybe someday my rating will get better...)

I really don't know one way or the other.  I do like it taking time to make a move rather than just instantly after you make a move like some DOS chess games I have. 

I believe this is just a feature for making the experience the most closer to playing against a human opponent as possible.

The thinking time is figuring out calculations.  There is an option if you are not playing in tournament mode that is called thinking lines.  This shows the moves it has calculated through, so if you want the best playing experience you can do one of two things: (1) set a time limit on the game (notice that you can give the computer one time limit and a different time limit to yourself, or (2) set it to infinite and then after a period of time you can do force move option.  If you watch the thinking lines option on infinite time period you'll notice that after about 1.5 minutes (depending on your computer's speed), it doesn't generally find a better move but will just plow through all options regardless.

In general, the longer a computer is thinking about a specific move, the better said move will be. There are exceptions, but, to answer your question, yeah, the computer actually needs this time to "think".

Computers think too, are you kidding? It often happens, actually, that it may think the position is quiet for quite some time and all of a sudden it thinks some crazy sacrifice wins by force. Naturally, if you force it to move in one second it may pick quite a different move than if it was thinking more liberally.

Now, it doesn't by any means desperately need a lot of time, but if you give it 40 minutes, it'll do the practical thing and make sure it doesn't waste its time. That's why if you set up a game with no time limit, it will never move until you force it to -- from the engine's perspective, if you have infinite time, why not take advantage of it? Understand that it doesn't care how much of your time it's wasting

I'm not sure all of the contributors to this thread are familiar with Chessmaster. What the OP is getting at is that Chessmaster's pseudo-human personalites will sometimes think for much longer than could possibly be required, given the move they play. For example, some of the personalities will take up to 2 minutes to reply to my 1. d4 in a 10 minute game.

I think this can only be to make it seem more realistic.

What I'm saying is, if you have 10 minutes, even if you don't absolutely need 10 minutes, using them can't hurt.

Is there a setting to get the personalities rated over 1000 to play as fast as the under 1000 ones? I don't want to wait 2 minutes for the program to reply to each of my moves. It takes too long to play a game.

I don't think you can change that setting on Chessmaster engines, but for unrated play, you can set separate time controls. Just pick a real fast time control for the engine and a longer time control for yourself.

I see the same thing happen when I play it too.  But the good news is that it seems that the CPU when playing as player X will usually play at around the same level whether I set its game time at 60 minutes or 2 minutes, at least at the 1500-ish range where I usually play. So I usually set asymmetric time controls, and although you can't do this for rated games, you can do it in the training mode/learn mode. But I agree, it's annoying to have a 1200 level personality take several minutes to to to figure out how to counter your first or second move, espcially when you know it will probably pick a bad reply anyway!