Perft(3) from 1978, with a twist!

[sje]

See: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=8 ... 80,1080528

[sje]

I see this as an example of "heroic" programming, a one-person project measured by effort if not by results. And not only could his program do perft(), but it could also find at least some forced mates although it appears this latter task required the use of a couple of tape drives. All of this in a computer language older than nearly all of us here and which had no recursion and no user functions.

Other heroic efforts I've seen:

1) A Pascal compiler written in a mid 1970s dialect of Basic for the Intel 8080.

2) A chess program written in an early 1970s Basic for the HP 2000 timeshare system.

3) A Fortran compiler also in Basic for the HP 2000 system.

4) A chess program written for the mid 1980s HP 41C calculator.

[Gerd Isenberg]

Great!

May be RSCE-1 author R.C. Smith is Rolf C. Smith, co-author of Schach from the early ACM tournaments?

[sje]

May be RSCE-1 author R.C. Smith is Rolf C. Smith, co-author of Schach from the early ACM tournaments?

It's a possibility, I suppose. I have been unable to find any other references to RSCE-1, at least on line.

Thirty three years from now in 2044, what might people be saying about the programs of today which run on such primitive hardware?

[wgarvin]

See: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=8 ... 80,1080528

That is officially awesome. Nice find!

[hMx]

I see this as an example of "heroic" programming, a one-person project measured by effort if not by results. And not only could his program do perft(), but it could also find at least some forced mates although it appears this latter task required the use of a couple of tape drives. All of this in a computer language older than nearly all of us here and which had no recursion and no user functions.

Other heroic efforts I've seen:

1) A Pascal compiler written in a mid 1970s dialect of Basic for the Intel 8080.

2) A chess program written in an early 1970s Basic for the HP 2000 timeshare system.

3) A Fortran compiler also in Basic for the HP 2000 system.

4) A chess program written for the mid 1980s HP 41C calculator.

Around 1975 I have written the first precursor of Chest. It was written in Fortran-II (no recursion) and could solve mate-in-2. It did not need or use any tapes. It ran on an IBM-1130 with 32 K bytes, and needed half an hour for one job.

But I would not say that was "heroic".

[sje]

Around 1975 I have written the first precursor of Chest. It was written in Fortran-II (no recursion) and could solve mate-in-2. It did not need or use any tapes. It ran on an IBM-1130 with 32 K bytes, and needed half an hour for one job.

It was back in 1973 when I got my first hands-on Fortran experience with an IBM 1130. I had learned a bit of the language four years prior, but not very well as was evidenced by the many mistakes I made just getting my first Fortran program to compile and run. It was a simple application which generated a table of the first 100 positive integers and their floating point square roots.

On the 1130 I used, it took nearly a minute to wait for the disk to come up to speed before booting the CPU. I had to be at the site (a high school) personally as there was no dial-up connectivity to the Teletype terminal at my high school. I could only program on fair weather days as it was a five kilometer bicycle ride to the site.