What AWIT(y) chess program. Tony Marsland's, that is....

[Carey]

This is just to let people know that Tony Marsland has released the source for his selective search chess program AWIT from the 70's and 80's.

For those of you who don't remember Tony Marsland, he was one of the people who organized the first US computer chess tournament. He also did a lot of computer chess research in the 70s and 80s.

The program is written in ALGOL-W, a predecessor of Pascal. At the time that was a very reasonable choice, but as time went on, the language & compiler became more of a problem. Limitations of the language forced him to write some less than pretty code. Limitations of the compiler forced even more complicated code in an effort to get better speed. Eventually, the program became so big that the one existing Algol-W compiler couldn't even compile it without special effort to trick it.

It should have been rewritten, but he never got around to it. He was busy doing research with other programs, had limited mainframe time, was busy with life in general, etc.

So this is still the AlgolW code that was used and experimented with for so many years.

Good for history, not so good for those of us who would like to really run the program to best of its abilities on modern hardware. (Yes, I admit it... I would like to see how well a selective search program works. I know the math behind why selective search is considered risky, but look at all the stuff modern programs do now... I've never been a fan of brute force searching. It just seems.... wrong.)

With the help of Glyn Webster's AW2C converter program, Mr. marsland was able to get the program running again.

Unfortunately, with the speed of modern hardware, we were able to play more self play games in a few days than Awit had played in its entire life. And that let a few bugs show up.

Unfortunately, this version was the only version of Awit that still existed. He didn't have any ealier versions to see when or where the bugs might have been written. And trying to debug a program you hadn't looked at in 25 years is a bit of a challenge.

But with some persistence, he was able to get things working fairly well.


And its finally ready to be released.... So if you'd like to see what a classic selective search program looks like:

http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~tony/Pub ... uterChess/


Mr. marsland is also looking for any photos of him running Awit, so he could add them to his website.

[bob]

This is just to let people know that Tony Marsland has released the source for his selective search chess program AWIT from the 70's and 80's.

For those of you who don't remember Tony Marsland, he was one of the people who organized the first US computer chess tournament. He also did a lot of computer chess research in the 70s and 80s.

The program is written in ALGOL-W, a predecessor of Pascal. At the time that was a very reasonable choice, but as time went on, the language & compiler became more of a problem. Limitations of the language forced him to write some less than pretty code. Limitations of the compiler forced even more complicated code in an effort to get better speed. Eventually, the program became so big that the one existing Algol-W compiler couldn't even compile it without special effort to trick it.

It should have been rewritten, but he never got around to it. He was busy doing research with other programs, had limited mainframe time, was busy with life in general, etc.

So this is still the AlgolW code that was used and experimented with for so many years.

Good for history, not so good for those of us who would like to really run the program to best of its abilities on modern hardware. (Yes, I admit it... I would like to see how well a selective search program works. I know the math behind why selective search is considered risky, but look at all the stuff modern programs do now... I've never been a fan of brute force searching. It just seems.... wrong.)

With the help of Glyn Webster's AW2C converter program, Mr. marsland was able to get the program running again.

Unfortunately, with the speed of modern hardware, we were able to play more self play games in a few days than Awit had played in its entire life. And that let a few bugs show up.

Unfortunately, this version was the only version of Awit that still existed. He didn't have any ealier versions to see when or where the bugs might have been written. And trying to debug a program you hadn't looked at in 25 years is a bit of a challenge.

But with some persistence, he was able to get things working fairly well.


And its finally ready to be released.... So if you'd like to see what a classic selective search program looks like:

http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~tony/Pub ... uterChess/


Mr. marsland is also looking for any photos of him running Awit, so he could add them to his website.

Tony specifically asked for windows tests, since he ran it under unix. He emailed me about this last week, told him I would test it on several different boxes when I get back to the office next week. Others are free to do the same. Nice to have a few "oldies" around (1991 Cray Blitz was another...)

[jwes]

Any chance you could upload the c translation of awit so I don't have to do the ocmal-aw2c stuff?

[Carey]

Tony specifically asked for windows tests, since he ran it under unix. He emailed me about this last week, told him I would test it on several different boxes when I get back to the office next week. Others are free to do the same. Nice to have a few "oldies" around (1991 Cray Blitz was another...)

Yeah. I was his only windows tester a couple years ago and I got out of it about a year ago. (Programmer's funk and then some personal issues and then some family issues.)

I had originally planned to convert it to FreePascal but he found Glyn's AW2C converter which was a much better choice. Although it is a little inconvenient to set up. (About like some of the pascl to C converters.)

It was fortunate he found the aw2c converter instead of me going to Pascal because we found a few bugs in the original program and I would have gone beserk trying to figure out where I had screwed up in my conversion to Pascal.

(In all fairness to Mr. Marsland and his program, we ran a lot of self-test games. Probably more in two days than Awit had ever ran in its previous life. And we were going deeper than it was designed for. And to make debugging difficult, this was the only version of Awit that he had left. So tracking down the changes that caused the problems, and trying to remember why he did what, was definetly hard for him.)

I had also planned to wrap a Winboard wrapper around it, but trying to hook into the Aw2c I/O functions turned out to be too much trouble.


I have been trying to gather up some old programs, but I've just run out of people. I'm just not good enough to find them. After spending several years, I just got rather down about the lack of progress.

J. Schaeffer has a couple old programs, but nothing too famous and I need the author's permission to get them. And I can't find the authors.

Mr. Marsland still has a few (according to his archive records), but again, he needs the author's permission and I can't find the authors.

I did hear from the authors of one program. They are willing to release a modern compiled executable but probably not the source. That may or may not change in the future.

There is still one other program I am waiting on that I can't name yet.

And that's pretty much it. I'm tapped out in finding worthy programs and their authors.


And I had seriously planned on going through those two scanned versions of CrayBlitz, compare them to the electronic copy you found and try to recreate working versions. But I never gone done. It was just so darn tedious and hard to read the scanned images.

Same for Blitz.


And I need to find a new place to host my old classic chess program website. I had to remove it from Google's web servers because it used too much javascript and they were getting rid of all web sites that used javascript for security reasons. (Or so they claimed. My guess is it allowed too much freedom in website design and they prefered the 'cookie cutter' look for all of them.)

[Carey]

Any chance you could upload the c translation of awit so I don't have to do the ocmal-aw2c stuff?

Unfortunately, the C trnaslated version still needs the aw2c support libraries.

So it'd have to be compiled for the same compiler you are using.


I don't happen to have a recent C translated copy. In fact, I don't even have aw2c, OCAML etc. installed anymore to even get the c translated version.

I did two years ago when I was helping Mr. Marsland with this project, but I haven't helped him since I got my new computer.

Mr. Marsland contacted me just today about releasing Awit, so I haven't done anything at all with this final version except post a release notice.

Sorry.


If you wait a little while, I'm sure somebody will come along and provide the C translation and probably some libraries to use. (Hopefully for a compiler you have....)

[Jim Ablett]

Here's the Windows AWIT executable
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5047625/awit-2009-win32-ja.zip

regards,
Jim.

[jwes]

Here's the Windows AWIT executable
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5047625/awit-2009-win32-ja.zip

Could you post the C sources that you compiled?

[Jim Ablett]

Here's the Windows AWIT executable
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5047625/awit-2009-win32-ja.zip

Could you post the C sources that you compiled?

Included

Jim.