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Subject: That was MY translation Re: qBASIC Chess program...

Author: Ernest Bonnem

Date: 04:27:14 02/25/03

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This CSS program is very likely the first source chess program ever published
for large scale didactic purposes. It was written in Basic by Dieter
Steinwender, and I personally copied it from several issues of the german
magazine Computer Schach  und Spiele where it was published in 1984-85.
I then translated it into French and, only a year ago, sent it to the
gambitchess.com site as a demo download (there also is a qbasic .exe which I
compiled)

I had lots of fun 15 years ago with this brute-force (alpha-beta) program. It
has some bugs (particularly concerning stalemate) which I tried to override, but
not completely.
At the time, processor speed limited practical depth (PR, for profondeur) to
about 4. Nowadays, you can easily set it to 6 or more and funny side-effect bugs
can occur in a game : for instance (with PR=6) 1. e4 d5 2. exd5 Qxd5 and when
you look at the position (PO command), you see that a Pawn has replaced the
white Queen on d1 !!!

The qBasic Minimax program, written 10 years later by Dieter Steinwender and
Chrilly Donninger, is the grown-up son of the CSS program.



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