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Your first chess program.
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Robert Hyatt



Joined: 27 Feb 2006
Posts: 15866
Location: Birmingham, AL
PostPost subject: Re: Your first chess program.    Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2012 7:34 pm Reply to topic Reply with quote
Dan Honeycutt wrote:
Programmers,

How did you get into chess programming? What was your first program like?

In my case, the year was 1972. I was a graduate student at Georgia Tech. I had gotten into chess a few years before, inspired, like many of that era, by the ascent of Bobby Fisher. I figured it would be neat to write a chess program.

To run a program back then you typed each line of code on a punch card and carried your deck to ICS (Information and Computer Science). Your program then got a sliver of time on Tech's Burroughs B5500 mainframe. After a few minutes or hours depending on how busy they were, you got back your deck and output.

At least that's how it was for the unwashed masses. I had special privileges. I was on a research assistanceship doing work for the FAA. We were studying characteristics of flat cable. (Flat cable was sheets of conductors used in communications facilities which, today, would be a single fiber-optic cable.) Part of my work involved inverting large complex arrays. Complex as in R + jX, there was nothing complicated about it at all. I simply provided input to a canned program.

Now, the matrix inversion took time. Because of that I had a user number that allowed me long run times during the night hours. I also had access to teletype terminals in the EE department . The terminals had BASIC available and you could save your program on paper tape. None of this card deck misery for me!

With these advanced computing facilities available I set to work on my chess program. I had no idea what I was doing. I started with something like:

Code:
10 DIM B(8,8)


"There, I've got a board to play on." I next defined pieces and went to work to make them move. After some weeks of steady work in the night hours when my user number was good my pieces could make, best I could tell, legal moves. Next I worked on a brute force sort of search - I'd never heard of alpha-beta pruning. I don't know what sort of NPS I was getting, but in a minute or so I could search 3 or 4 ply. My search was not slowed down by my evaluation. That consisted of nothing but material and proximity to the center.

I was quite pleased with myself. While far from competition for anyone other that a rank beginner, my program would capture anything left hanging and even found some simple combinations such as forks. Then one day the EE department secretary called me and told me I needed to schedule an appointment with Dr. Paris, the department head. That could not be good news. I was friendly with the secretary so I asked what it was about. She didn't know. That was even more ominous.

I arrived at Dr. Paris' office at the appointed time. After a few pleasantries he showed me a printout of the department's computing time costs - much of it attributable to me. Exorbitant I think was the term he used. I was completely taken aback. Naive as I was it had never dawned on me that computing time cost money. I considered lying and saying I'd been inverting lots of flat cable arrays but I came clean and told him about my chess program. He was actually quite nice about it. He said while my innovation was commendable the department simply couldn't afford it and my chess programming had to end.

Over the years I lost my last printout of my program. I would be interested in going back now to see what I did.

Best
Dan H.


My first one was "discovered" pretty cleverly. I started the first one in the Fall of 1968. One day the department chairman, who had gotten to know me pretty well came over to the lab and asked: "Hyatt, I have been watching you for 30 minutes. What on earth are you doing? I have seen you go to the keypunch lab, punch one card, stick it in the card reader, I watched the lights on the front of the /360 model 40 blink for a while, then I watched you go over to the printer, space it up a few times, and then back to the keypunch lab you go. Repeated several times. What ARE you doing over there?"

My response: "I'm playing chess."

His reply: "Of course you are, why did I even ask?"

This was in October of 1968. I got interested because of Spock playing the computer on Star Trek, I think the series started in 65 or 66... I had been playing since I was 10 or so, so it seemed like a good idea. Smile
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Subject Author Date/Time
Your first chess program. Dan Honeycutt Fri Apr 20, 2012 1:07 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. Martin Sedlak Fri Apr 20, 2012 1:28 pm
            Re: Your first chess program. Sam Hamilton Fri Apr 20, 2012 2:15 pm
            Re: Your first chess program. Joshua Shriver Sun Apr 22, 2012 4:54 am
                  Re: Your first chess program. Ted Wong Sun Apr 22, 2012 6:28 am
      Re: Your first chess program. Thomas Petzke Fri Apr 20, 2012 2:02 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. Don Dailey Fri Apr 20, 2012 4:07 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. Gerd Isenberg Fri Apr 20, 2012 5:31 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. H.G.Muller Fri Apr 20, 2012 6:10 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. Jan Brouwer Fri Apr 20, 2012 7:05 pm
            Re: Your first chess program. Mark Lefler Sat Apr 21, 2012 11:59 pm
                  Re: Your first chess program. Don Dailey Sun Apr 22, 2012 12:11 am
                        Re: Your first chess program. Ed Schroder Sun Apr 22, 2012 8:28 am
                              Re: Your first chess program. Don Dailey Sun Apr 22, 2012 11:23 am
                              Re: Your first chess program. J. B. Buijs Sun Apr 22, 2012 2:03 pm
                                    Re: Your first chess program. Don Dailey Sun Apr 22, 2012 2:22 pm
                                          Re: Your first chess program. Dan Honeycutt Sun Apr 22, 2012 4:18 pm
                                                Re: Your first chess program. Don Dailey Sun Apr 22, 2012 4:23 pm
                                                      Re: Your first chess program. Dan Honeycutt Sun Apr 22, 2012 4:31 pm
                                                            Re: Your first chess program. Ed Schroder Sun Apr 22, 2012 5:11 pm
                                                                  Re: Your first chess program. Julien MARCEL Sun Apr 22, 2012 7:35 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. Robert Hyatt Fri Apr 20, 2012 7:34 pm
            Re: Your first chess program. Julien MARCEL Fri Apr 20, 2012 11:33 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. J. B. Buijs Sat Apr 21, 2012 6:27 am
      Re: Your first chess program. Evert Glebbeek Sat Apr 21, 2012 6:32 am
      Re: Your first chess program. Jon Dart Sat Apr 21, 2012 7:27 pm
            Re: Your first chess program. Martin Brown Mon Apr 23, 2012 10:19 am
                  Re: Your first chess program. Jon Dart Tue Apr 24, 2012 12:01 am
      Re: Your first chess program. Harald Lüßen Sat Apr 21, 2012 11:20 pm
            Re: Your first chess program. F. Bluemers Sat Apr 21, 2012 11:44 pm
                  Re: Your first chess program. Harald Lüßen Sun Apr 22, 2012 8:43 am
                        Re: Your first chess program. Matthias Hartwich Mon Apr 23, 2012 8:11 pm
                              Re: Your first chess program. Thorsten Czub Tue Apr 24, 2012 6:50 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. Joshua Shriver Sun Apr 22, 2012 4:43 am
      Re: Your first chess program. Ron Murawski Mon Apr 23, 2012 12:16 am
            Re: Your first chess program. Vincent Diepeveen Mon Apr 23, 2012 8:38 am
            Re: Your first chess program. Evert Glebbeek Mon Apr 23, 2012 8:45 am
                  Re: Your first chess program. Ron Murawski Wed Apr 25, 2012 4:45 am
      Re: Your first chess program. Martin Brown Mon Apr 23, 2012 9:36 am
      Re: Your first chess program. John Merlino Tue Apr 24, 2012 1:06 am
            Re: Your first chess program. Vincent Diepeveen Tue Apr 24, 2012 5:28 pm
                  Re: Your first chess program. John Merlino Tue Apr 24, 2012 6:41 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. Oscar Toledo G. Fri May 04, 2012 5:28 pm
      Re: Your first chess program. Giorgio Medeot Thu May 10, 2012 3:50 pm
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