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Your first chess program.
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Martin Brown



Joined: 18 Oct 2009
Posts: 46
PostPost subject: Re: Your first chess program.    Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2012 9:36 am Reply to topic Reply with quote
Dan Honeycutt wrote:
Programmers,

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


Not mine but the first computer chess I ever ran into was Arthur Norman's PDP-2 assembler program which dates from about 1974. A fair amount of the code was dedicated to driving a vector graphics display screen. It was cute but had a tendency to cheat creatively in complex positions due to overflowing the stack (which it detected and then gracefully cheated). This made it a lot harder for good chess players to beat. I think I still have a listing for it in the loft somewhere.

My own first chess prog was a 6502 asm version on the Acorn Atom in about 1980/81. Lost the code and wore out the hardware. It had material evaluation in one byte, alphabeta and swapoff heursistics and pawn = 3. Played it against a ZX81 chess program once and the the result was painful to watch. Machine against machine back then was very meandering. It did OK against weaker humans since they have a plan and it just had to hang on and eventually spot a tactical blunder that they had missed. Any half decent chess player could hammer it into the ground - as was true back then of all computer chess programs.

I also have a heavily modified copy of a small chess program from 1986 originally written in VAX Pascal by Bob Kushlis with help from Peter Gilbert (according to the headers). It has been through two dialects of Pascal and Modula2 so it now bears little resemblance to the original.

Is there a repository for historic chess programs from way back?
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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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