Author: Eli Liang
Date: 05:33:48 09/10/02
In 1957, Alex Bernstein created a computer chess program that handled all the rules of chess and ran on an IBM 704 with a _total_ of 7K x 36bits of valve storage. His program completed a 4-ply selective search in 8 minutes (but the processor speed of those IBM 704 was 0.042Mhz). In 1983, David Horne created a legendary chess program in 672 bytes of Z80 assembly language and Basic, but his program didn't handle castling or en-passant, had a fixed opening move, only did a 1-ply search, and was unable to actually finish a game. In comparison, last month, Douglas Bagnall created a chess program with a static evaluator and a full-width 3-ply search which seems pretty hefty at 4.4K bytes of JavaScript since not only was it coded in a HLA, but it is not limited in RAM as Horne's and Bernstein's programs were. (Not to mention that I've tried it and unfortunately, it seems buggy.) Questions: Was Bernstein's the smallest/tightest/most-memory-efficient _full_ chess program ever written? What do you think is the smallest possible full chess program with alpha-beta search that could ever be written in Intel x86 native code, if you disregard how to get moves in and out of it (no UI)? I know the latter question is rather imprecise because of issues concerning complexity of static evaluation, depth of search, etc., but I am just looking for some imprecise opinions.
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