Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 20:38:11 08/15/01
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On August 14, 2001 at 13:01:13, Roy Eassa wrote: >On August 14, 2001 at 07:40:47, John Alfred wrote: > >>Do you know of any attempts by anyone at a chess coprocessor daughterboard? >>(apart from anything to do with Deep Blue) >> > >There was a device called "The Chess Machine" that was sold as an ISA card for >the PC. You ran a special app and this card "took over", essentially replacing >your main CPU for the duration of your chess play/study. It had a nice >mouse-based GUI and loads of features, and played quite well for its time (back >in the DOS days). Its claim to fame was that it could turn a slow PC (e.g., >PC-XT) into a strong chess program, and it lived up to that. As PC CPUs got >faster, the Chess Machine lost its market and got quite cheap. > >I'm sure that's not exactly what you asked, but I wonder if somebody could pull >the same (or similar -- true coprocessor?) trick off today, in a world with 1.5+ >GHz main CPUs. There used to be a guy on ICC running a program named "big blue" I think. It was a 1978 version of Blitz (prior to Cray Blitz, and yes, I distributed source back then too...) He was a graphics card designer and was using a graphics card designed for SGI to run Blitz on in hardware. It was pretty fast (probably 10x faster than Crafty at that particular hardware time) but the 1978 program was really pretty out-dated (no null-move, etc). But it was very strong and gave many programs a lot of trouble, mine included, just because of the speed. (Blitz was not "dumb" but it wasn't near today's programs in strength, of course). But with that speed advantage, it was very dangerous. He disappeared a long while back and I haven't heard from him since. But it was pretty amazing the first time I noticed him playing Crafty and seeing his finger notes mention "Hyatt, Blitz, and 1978". :)
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