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Subject: Re: What Chess programs existed in the '60s?

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 16:02:08 04/14/00

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On April 14, 2000 at 00:37:11, David Blackman wrote:

>On April 13, 2000 at 22:47:20, Pete Galati wrote:
>
>MacHack by Richard Greenblatt was probably the best. This was probably the only
>competitive chess program ever written in Lisp. There were at least two other
>programs written at MIT, one of them by Kotok and McCarthy


MackHack wasn't written in lisp.  It was written in assembly language for the
Digital PDP-10 processor.  I had a copy of this I got from Greenblatt somewhere
in the very early 70's.  MackHack played in the 60's.  Other well-known programs
included Coko and chess 3.x, both of which played in the first ACM computer
chess event in 1970...



>
>I think just about everyone in US AI research back in the 1960s tried to write a
>chess program and quite a few probably succeeded in writing weak programs. One
>of the more famous ones was by Bell, Newell and Simon.
>
>At least two programs in the USSR. Alazarov, Adelson-Velskiy, Donskoy are names
>i vaguely remember and were involved with one or both programs. One of these
>programs beat the Kotok/McCarthy program in a short match. The other was called
>Kaissa. It continued to improve for a while and was probably the best in the
>world in the early 1970s.


It actually wasn't.  Chess 3.x and 4.x were both better, although the margin
wasn't too wide...


>
>Right at the end of the 1960s quite a few programmers in USA and Canada started
>on programs that became stronger and better known in the 1970s. This includes
>Slate, Aitken and Gorlen at NorthWestern University ; Monty Newborn ; Bob Hyatt
>; Hans Berliner .

true although several of those played their first move in the late 60's.  My
program made its first move in late 1968...



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