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Subject: Re: What ever Happened to Kaissia and Ostrich?

Author: Joshua Lee

Date: 00:22:15 06/29/01

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On June 28, 2001 at 14:44:29, Eugene Nalimov wrote:

>On June 28, 2001 at 03:48:27, David Blackman wrote:
>
>>On June 28, 2001 at 00:21:30, Joshua Lee wrote:
>>
>>>What did the programmers involved go on to do? Are their programs available?
>>
>>I did a websearch on some of the Kaissa programmers a while back and turned up
>>only a few computer chess history pages. If they have web pages of their own
>>they are hiding from the search engines well. I guess they would be in Russian
>>anyway. It's also worth noting that the Kaissa team would be getting quite old
>>now, and perhaps some of them are dead. I vaguely remember reading they had
>>trouble getting computer access for chess purposes in the mid 1970s. That might
>>not have improved until affordable micros with reasonable power reached Russia
>>(circa 1988?).
>>
>>I think Ostrich was Monty Newborn's. He was and maybe still is Professor in the
>>School of Computer Science at McGill University. He doesn't seem to have his own
>>web page at the University. He was publishing academic papers, including some
>>about computer chess, until recently. I don't remember hearing about him having
>>a program competing anywhere since the 1980s.
>>
>>I think both of these old programs were in assembly language. To run them you
>>would most likely need a very old computer (IBM 360 compatible mainframe for
>>Kaissa, was it some kind of Honeywell for Ostrich?). The programs were most
>>likely stored on a large deck of punched cards. I'm not sure if anyone would
>>have bothered to store them for such a long time after the computers were
>>obsolete. Think of several thousand punched cards and the space needed to store
>>them.
>
>Some of Kaissa versions were written in Fortran. And Mikhail Donskoy ported it
>to PC -- at least he had a PC version back in 1991. Don't know on which
>languuage it was written, and which compiler he used.
>
>Eugene


Someone here in the club must have some contacts?? It would be awesome if they
could get Kaissia and play some matches possibly against Crafty or some other
program!



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