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

Author: Pete Galati

Date: 08:55:06 04/15/00

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On April 14, 2000 at 19:02:08, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>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...

I'm starting to gather that Chess programs were not generally available to the
public until sometime in the '70s.  I wasn't interseted in computers at all
untill the last decade so I wasn't paying any attention back then.

Actually come to think of it, personal computers didn't exist during the '60s,
that's something I wasn't considering before.

Pete



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