Your first chess program.

[mclane]

I started 1986 with typing the BASIC Source into my Schneider CPC 464 (german version of Amstrad CPC). It got about 0.33 nodes/s.
My improvements just got it faster by a small margin so I started to rewrite it in assembler. Only having finished the move generator I went on in 1990 with an Atari Mega ST with Omicron BASIC (some 10 nodes/s interpreted) and Turbo C (500 nodes/s).
In 1992 I bought a 486 DX2...

i did it nearly similar, only that i began on the sinclair zx spectrum 16K before using the cpc464.

of course the zx spectrum keyboard was a pain in the ass with all those hardwired commands on it.

on the other hand, typos were nearly impossible.

the cpc 464 had a cool basic interpreter in the rom. it had a cool copy/paste feature implemented that made programming of similar blocks very easy.

i changed to atari ST and first used GFA basic . GFA had no numbers in front of the lines.
Later i switched to OMICRON Basic which was a little faster, but had
numbers.

on the pc (286, 486, etc.) i changed to POWER BASIC.

this was way faster.

[Ron Murawski]

Sorry, the 10 seconds came out totally wrong. I was thinking back and I remember the perft taking 10 seconds longer than I wanted it. So: it took 10 seconds more than a minute? Than 2 minutes? Something like that. I just remember an artificial boundary that I thought I could cross but never did. But I remember very clearly that I missed this goal by exactly 10 seconds. Keep in mind that the perft count was almost certainly wrong. It may have been doing a subset of all moves.

[nanochess]

I started in 1989 with a chess program written in Z80 machine code for computer with 6 digit led display, barely used 2K, it played sometimes and others it simply stood stuck . Was my best, as I had age 10. Later in 1992 was when I finally coded my first working chess program.

[Giorgio Medeot]

Back in 1990, while I was in High School, I had an hour a week free during lessons as I didn't attend the religion course. I was somewhat famous in my (little) school as I was a brilliant student back then, so I was trusted enough to be given the keys of the computer lab.
I was playing chess since I was 14, and I had just read an article about A/B, so I decided to write a chess program, and I did it in the only programming language I knew at the time (apart from BASIC, which I just hated): Prolog.
It took about 6 months, and in the end it could play legal chess up to a fixed depth of 3 plies.
There were a bunch of Olivetti M200 in the room, and I remember that the thing was sooo slow, that while I was waiting for it to spit out his "e2-e4" thing as his first move, I already had another machine started from that position. By the way, it took about 24 minutes to push his pawn...



Cheers,

• Giorgio