Hello all

[Dan Honeycutt]

But IMO, if you were to start from other engines' sources you'd probably lose some prestige... Except if you manage to get it top the charts.

Not if you're up front about what you're doing. Mike Byrne used to make Crafty personalities and weakened versions that were quite popular.

Best
Dan H.

[DaveKitt]

An idea for someone to try. Quite a few of my programs had both ply 1 move bonuses/penalties and PVT bonus/penalties. I spent a lot of time trying to move the PVT values deeper into the search w/out much success. Never tried that with the PSH though, might work, could have then played to actually achieve or avoid the sac like positions. The bxh7+ effectively added 5 or 6 ply of depth. As I recall, the rules for that one required (from white POV) wp on e5, wn access to g5, wq access to h5 or h4. bp at e6 and g7 and no bn access to f6. Something like that, it was pretty specific rules to give sac high chance of succeeding. At the time, none of the micro chess programs had a prayer of seeing deep enough to play the sac, even though fairly weak humans could find it. However, with one-reply to check and singular extensions, I think the sac can be found at much shallower depths, making the whole PSH less valuable.

[DaveKitt]

Nice! Thanks for being so supportive of the Novag products! I still have a robot adversary, but unfortunately I tried to run it several years ago and it was quite dead. Sorry the Savant stopped working, it was a cool product. At the time (before laptops) it had the largest LCD in production. For the techies - it had a custom VLSI chip to drive the LCD. For the programmer, the entire 381 bit (more or less, don't remember exact count) image controlling each segment was serially clocked into the custom VLSI chip.

[Steve B]

Yes very few Robots are still working
i have two and both worked for a total of about 2-3 playing hours and then the arms motors failed
about 5-6 years ago i was able to contact Stephen Brosseau who helped develop the motors used in the Robot
http://www.sbrosseau.com/
he agreed to try and repair one of them but eventually gave up

here's a short video taken when the Robot was still working:
http://alain.zanchetta.free.fr/videos/MissingKing.wmv
More Robot Videos Here:
http://www.zanchetta.net/default.aspx?C ... age=videos

If you think about it the Touch Screen Savants were light years ahead of their time
i mean only recently are touch screens all the rave being used in all of the new smart phone and Ipad devices

a quick question if i may..
testing your memory(i guess this entire posting experience for you has been a huge memory jogging exercise)
do you recall if Novag ever released a module( Eprom) for the Robot with a "Great Games Collection"?

the Robot manual mentions this seperate module but i have never seen the module nor do i know of any chess computer collector that has it

Reeling In The Years Regards
Steve

[fern]

David, Ed said same the thing: "I will never go trough the task of creating a new program...." And there he is, with his ProDeo with frequent updates... I suppose that writing a programs is like my job, writing books. You can get bored from time to time, burned and tired to death, but as soon a decent lapse has gone to get some rest, the virus com again. And good it is so because life is not bearable without a task on any kind.

my best
Fern

[DaveKitt]

Steve, I don't know if such a module was released. We did put a module together of great classic games. If memory serves (always questionable!) we had Jack Peters who was the LA Times chess columnist select and provide the games. I believe there was a socket for this and I recall testing the module, but again, don't know if it was actually made into a shipping product.
Dave

[DaveKitt]

Fern, ah yes, but my recurring virus has been trying to improve my sorely lacking golf swing, which has many advantages over programming in I can pursue that activity outdoors! However, I must say all this posting has gotten me curious enough to take a look at some of the open sources out there. Looked at Fruit 2.1 which is much more in my style of programming - i.e. limited commenting, very 'C' like, and same flavor of data representations. Crafty or Stockfish are probably better starting pts as they use bitboards. At this point though, it is enough to just stare in fascination as search depths of 20+ plies are achieved in midgame positions in a minute or less.

[Steve B]

Thanks Dave
Very Interesting to learn that work was actually put in to make the module
i'll keep looking for it

Forever Searching Regards
Steve

[fern]

20 ply or more, yes, that is the reason I do not play those monsters which does not give any chance to you.
BTW, my second beloved dedicated unit -after my first love, Champion Chess challenger- , was a Constellation 3.6, which I played a lot, lost a lot, won a lot, etc. I remember a mate I got with a deep search of 16 moves on my side. Probably the moment when my chess brain got his best...
After lot of years I got a Superconny and there I have most of my current pleasures. And I have other contrivances coming from your mind, David, as some little hand held units that play even better than SC. Saphire, one of them.
They are strong and I lose lot of games, BUt you always have some chance to get a point or half a point. They go deep, but not THAT deep as these PC monsters.
As Steven B, I get most of my fun from those units which I collect to this day. And I feel, talking to you, as some of my readers feel, I suppose, talking to me when I am in the old exercise of signing books. Feel happy and weird, that is...
One of the charms of this place has been precisely that: I have known Martin Bryant, ed Schroeder, Bob, Don, Larry, sherwin and so many others chess programmers that to me, sometime, where kind of Olympus gods far above my head.
Now I just stopped a game againts wchess which was in state of equilibrium. Thats the moment to stop...

Fern

[IanO]

I just want to say thanks for supporting a serial port on the Super System line of Novag computers. I had a lot of fun playing my Sapphire II automatically on the internet servers because I could write a serial port adapter for WinBoard.

Was the decision to have a serial port to make testing and development easier or was it there to sell more accessories? That is, was it primarily a marketing feature or a development tool?

How did you like H8 programming compared to 6502 and 68000 development?

I'm also curious whether you provided any support to Phoenix Chess Systems to enable their emulation of your older programs (Super Expert B/C and Diablo) in their Revelation computer. Would you consider porting WChess to their platform?