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Subject: Re: in 1977 Fischer laughed after playing the GreenBlatt computer.

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 19:03:28 07/23/01

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On July 23, 2001 at 16:25:48, Roy Eassa wrote:

>On July 23, 2001 at 10:36:53, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On July 22, 2001 at 12:39:57, Roy Eassa wrote:
>>
>>>I made an appointment to work with Richard Greenblatt when I was undergrad at
>>>MIT.  It was about 1979, and we were going to resurrect that old program
>>>(MacHack, as I recall) and improve it.  I had to get up early on a Saturday
>>>morning (death for a college student!) to make the appointment.  Greenblatt, who
>>>had a well-slept-in cot in his office and never made eye contact with me when we
>>>set up the meeting, never showed up.  That was the end of my chess programming
>>>career.
>>
>>
>>Greenblatt was a "character" to say the least.
>>
>>The main thing new about the "program" fischer played was that it was the
>>first real effort to use special-purpose hardware to search a game tree.
>>
>>Belle (early versions circa 1977) had hardware move generation and evaluation,
>>and makemove/unmakemove, but the search was software.  Greenblatt and others
>>developed a thing called "CHEOPS" (CHEss OPerationS if I recall correctly) that
>>could search very quickly.  It had no positional evaluation at all, and was
>>used to accept or reject moves proposed by the normal MackHack chess engine
>>by doing a significantly deeper search on them but only looking at material.
>>
>>It never played in any computer event so we all assumed it didn't work very
>>well, in practice...
>>
>>IE no MackHack version ever played in any ACM event whatsoever...
>
>
>The brain cells in my head that held "CHEOPS" just received their first
>electrical current in at least 15 years!  (I'd totally forgotten that term.)


It's amazing what us "old, arrogant, incompetent, moronic professors" have
experienced in the past, isn't it.  :)



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