Author: Steven Edwards
Date: 06:54:59 10/29/03
Go up one level in this thread
On October 29, 2003 at 09:48:13, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>On October 28, 2003 at 23:46:56, Steven Edwards wrote:
>>On October 28, 2003 at 23:37:28, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>On October 28, 2003 at 21:10:37, Steven Edwards wrote:
>>>>Here's a one question historical quiz that will test your knowledge of our
>>>>little corner of the programming world:
>>>>
>>>>Who was/were the first programmer(s) to use bitboards for piece
>>>>location/property representation?
>>
>>>without reading, I believe was both Slate/Atkin in chess 4.0 in 1974, and
>>>the russian group working on Kaissa, with Donskoy as the main programmer.
>>
>>Of course, both the NWU Chess and the Kaissa programs used bitboards, and in
>>apparantly an identical manner. Possibly Kaissa also used them in its causality
>>facility ("method of analogies").
>>
>>>They apparently discovered this idea independently, at about the same time,
>>>and both showed up with bitboard programs at the same time...
>>
>>True. But neither is the answer to the question! I know you know the answer,
>>so please give it another try.
>
>
>OK... perhaps you intended a bid of misleading here? IE I assumed "chess". If
>you are not specifically talking about chess, then my second choice would be
>Samuel's checker program. He didn't need 64 bit words of course, since checkers
>only has 32 usable squares.
Yes, Arthur Samuel was the first. Here's the rot-13 of the rot-13:
The answer is not slate and atkin with their nwu chess program nor is
it donsky et all from moscow with their kaissa program. The first
bitboard program was the famous checker player for the ibm mainframes
from the fifties written by arthur samuel. Born in the first year of
the twentieth century he was at the time of his passing eighty nine
years later probably the world's oldest active computer programmer.
His pioneering work was influencial in having the various boolean
bitwise operators being standard in modern instruction sets, without
which today's chess bitboard programs would be infeasible. His papers
described how he came up with the idea of embedding a thirty two bit
representation of the active squares on a checker board in the thirty
six bit word of the ibm mainframes he had available. His program also
used machine learning, an opening book, transposition detection, and
many other techniques all long before their appearences in chess
playing programs.
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