TalkChess.com

[Don Dailey]

My first program was before I had a computer - it was a set of instructions that a human could follow and it would produce just one move in a deterministic way. I don't think I was the first to write a paper program but I din't know at the time that it had every been done before. I was in high school 9th grade and knew nothing about computers. At the time regular 4 function calculators were first coming out but few people could afford them and they were not programmable.

I don't remember much about it, but it was basically composed of questions that you would answer which would direct you to various steps - a big decision tree basically. It was not overly complicated to execute and did not even do a 1 ply search nor did it have an evaluation function which would have been pretty taxing to compute by hand anyway. I do remember the question for the very first step: 1. Are you in check? - all out of check moves were handled separately.

There were some provisions for handling just the most trivial tactics - nothing so sophisticated as a swap-off but for instance if an up-capture was legal it was always the preferred move and otherwise if a piece was up-attacked capturing the attacker or moving the piece was given priority. If one of those rules did not kick in, some kind of move would be prescribed to develop a piece, where moves towards the center were preferred. There was no random move selection, eventually you would get to a rule that would force some move to be played. There was no scoring either, a rule either kicked in or you moved to the next rule.

After getting familiar with the program you could usually execute moves without the program as the steps were easy to follow and remember.

I think it would be really fun to build such a program today - a computer could be used to "test" it and you could probably even get such a thing up to a level that a beginner might be challenged by using a computer to figure out what rules work best.

To be practical you must avoid complex calculations - nobody is going to want to tally points and add things up just to execute such a program - it has to be simple and not confusing.
_________________
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons." -Kang and Kodos