Author: David Blackman
Date: 00:57:17 06/17/00
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On June 16, 2000 at 15:40:00, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >I think it would be terrific if somebody could get this program running on a >modern computer and see how good it is. :) > >What language is it written in? (Besides massive amounts of assembly...) I might >consider porting the algorithms to C. > >-Tom It was written in assembly language only, for the CDC 6400, 6600 and 60 bit Cyber computers. I doubt there are any of those still running. Unlike more popular antiques (PDP-11, VAX, IBM-360) there are unlikely to be any software emulators available either. Those old CDC machines had a very strange instruction set. It might take a while to understand what quite simple code sequences are doing if all you have seen are X86 and various RISCs. I haven't seen any of the Chess 4.5 code, but the programmers were reputedly Fortran hackers, so their style of code might be yet another barrier to understanding by modern programmers. That said, it would be kind of neat to get a historically important program up and running again. Looking over some of its old games, i got the impression it was a very well balanced program that usually made sensible looking moves. But i wouldn't expect it to be competitive with the best modern programs, even on equal speed hardware.
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