Written by Ken Thompson and was a precursor to Belle. It was a program that ran on a DEC minicomputer (PDP-11).
Originally written in an intermediate version of Unix C. At the time, C hadn't been finalized or publicly announced.
It competed in the New Jersey open in 1972 and in the Atlanta ACM tournament of 1973.
The program was officially "Belle" but the USCF wouldn't allow a single name to be entered into a tournament, so he put a "T"
on it with no particular meaning. T. Belle does not stand for "Tinkerbelle" or "Thompson Belle" or "Telephone Belle" (he worked at
the phone company during that time.) Mr. Thompson definetly says that "T." has "no particular meaning".
The program was tested in the Westfield chess club and it got a 1420 ranting.
It was retired around 1975 in favor of the more famous hardware based "Belle" chess computer / program.
Code ported to modern systems by Jim Ablett 03/04/2026
Windows & Linux builds (console & winboard support)
"Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions."
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Ted Summers
Jim Ablett wrote: ↑Fri Apr 03, 2026 11:53 pm
Strange, no errors here. What time settings are you using?
5 sec/move in Arena, and I've even tried to directly enter 'time 5' in Arenas command window.
But the hangs are only one problem - the other problem is that it makes completely crazy moves,
you can capture one of its piece after the other ...
Jim Ablett wrote: ↑Fri Apr 03, 2026 11:53 pm
Strange, no errors here. What time settings are you using?
5 sec/move in Arena, and I've even tried to directly enter 'time 5' in Arenas command window.
But the hangs are only one problem - the other problem is that it makes completely crazy moves,
you can capture one of its piece after the other ...
Hi Franz,
Winboard fixed time per move tc wasn't working. Fixed now.
Jim Ablett wrote: ↑Fri Apr 03, 2026 11:53 pm
Strange, no errors here. What time settings are you using?
5 sec/move in Arena, and I've even tried to directly enter 'time 5' in Arenas command window.
But the hangs are only one problem - the other problem is that it makes completely crazy moves,
you can capture one of its piece after the other ...
RTFM
You need to start the engine with the command line argument "-xboard".
BTW, it was told it reaches 200 nps at the early times. If you set the depth to 3 you should come close to tournament level, in Arena you can achive that by setting the Init string to "sd 3",
