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

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 11:03:04 04/15/00

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On April 15, 2000 at 11:55:06, Pete Galati wrote:

>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


'personal computers' (not to be confused with the PC architecture by the same
name developed by IBM and cloned by everyone) were not available in the early
70's...  1975-76 saw the first 'viable' machines using the old 808x and z80
processors (and yes, 6502's and 6800's...)

But they were dog-slow...

In the early 70's _everybody_ used a mainframe, or at least a big
minicomputer...



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