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Subject: Re: How did Alen Turning's program work?

Author: Pete Galati

Date: 07:22:00 04/21/00

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On April 21, 2000 at 07:43:51, Alessandro Scotti wrote:

>On April 20, 2000 at 19:51:02, Pete Galati wrote:
>
>>I've seen Alen Turning's Chess program that only existed on paper mentioned a
>>few times, but I don't think I've seen any mention of how it actually worked.
>>
>>Has his program ever been published?
>
>I'm very interested in this subject of reviving old programs. After a little
>search I was able to dig out the original papers by Kotok and Bloom (in the form
>of bitmap scanned pages!) but it seems I'm missing a couple of additional pages
>which contained moves from actual games, a very useful thing for testing. If
>there's enough information available it could be possible to write a program
>that plays (more or less) the same even if the original code is not available.
>
>Sorry if I haven't answered your question... I'm looking for info too!

The ultimate Chess program is always the one you can't have, in this case
Turing's Chess program.  If this program came out in 1950, that makes Chess
programming approximatly 50 years old this year.  I'm curious about when in 1950
he did his first tests of it.

On this page http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/scrapbook/ai.html  there is a dead
link of someone's page that used to go into great detail about his Turochess
program.  See this sentence:

  "There is a substantial description of Turing's chess programming in a website
dedicated to computer chess playing by Martin
  Ander and Hinrich Bueker. They use the description Turing gave of his program
in the 1953 book, Faster than Thought."

So maybe the trick is to get hold of that book, I have no idea if it's still in
print, most books that I've ever looked for have been out of print for some odd
reason.  I didn't manage to find the bitmaps you mention.  I'll have to go get
my library card renewed today and see what I can find out about that book
"Faster than Thought".

Pete



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