Author: Carey
Date: 19:43:29 09/23/05
Go up one level in this thread
On September 23, 2005 at 20:25:01, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>On September 22, 2005 at 13:38:04, Carey wrote:
>
>Cool stuff. Browsing thru chess 4.6 (COMPASS) and Duchess (IBM ASM) was a trip
>down "memory lane" for me, having programmed on both of those machines/assembly
>languages way back when.
I thought you might find it interesting, since you competed against both of
those.
Most people these days find it interesting for historical reasons, but you had
first hand experience with those systems and the programs.
You've actually sat across the table from those programs, wondering if it was
going to find a move that CrayBlitz had missed.
You know... one of these days, you really should write down a lot of the side
stories about those tournaments. All the interesting bits of trivia and
encounters and so on. I think a lot of people today would get a kick out of it.
I've browsed through the CCC and rec.games.chess.computer archives and found old
messages from you telling about this experience or that encounter, etc. and it
was a lot of fun to read.
You are the only one still around after all this time. And not only are you
still interested, you are still productive and competitive!! I have *no* idea
how you've managed to keep your interest in computer chess this long!!
Incredible.
>The stuff from "blitz" seems to be essentially worthless, unfortunately...
Yeah. I know.
But it's all that he found, and I figured a little bit of 'worthless' was better
than nothing.
>There used to be a guy on ICC that played and had a version of blitz. I think
Really...?
>the account was something like "dark blue" rather than "deep Blue" or something
>along those lines. He had the 1978 version and had moved parts of it into some
>sort of high-powered PCI graphics card... I will see if I can figure out who
A graphics card... intriguing. I've thought of using those things for numerical
computations, but the limited precision just wasn't enough to do FFTs, etc.
>it
>was and if he is still around. He definitely had the complete source.
Oh cool. That would be cool.
I assume it was probably FORTRAN 66, right? If so, it would probably still
compile, too.
>I could probably scan in a version of Cray Blitz that I still have a printed
>copy of. It was probably the 1986 WCCC version, so it is pretty old, and is not
Hey, that would be cool! It doesn't matter that it's hardwired for the Cray.
I didn't know you still had a printed copy. (By the way, a couple of authors
I've talked to are in the same situation... No electronic copies, just some old
printouts.)
(I don't suppose there is a cray emulator around, so people could have fun...
Probably not. Maybe Qemu emulator could be extended for the Cray, but it
wouldn't be worth the effort. Still, it would be fun... I mention on the page
that some cell phones today have more computing power than many of the computers
from the 70s and 80s... (Exluding the Crays, of course.) It would be real
amusing to get CrayBlitz ported to run under a cell phone... [laugh!] No, I'm
not going to do it and I know there are difficulties etc., but it sure is a
funny mental image. Condensing a room full of Cray down to a phone...)
That would definetly be a worthwhile addition to the collection.
>that recent since the program played thru 1994 and was modified through that
>date. The danger of scanning is that it won't run of course, since things line
>1 (one) and l (lowercase l) get screwed up with OCR software (to name just a
>single case, there are lots of others).
I know about the scanning experience! [shudder] It is not fun at all.
Actually, I found a lot of the stuff I've scaned went okay... Especially if you
let it learn the font. The hard part was trying to scan old magazine
photocopies. Poor quality magazine printing to begin with, followed by a poor
photocopy at an angle. Trying to tell ( from [ from {, ; from : and so on...
Lots of fun.
For the record, we do have one more significant tournament program comming for
certain. It just hasn't arrived yet. (Don't want to name anybody.) The
authors agreed to it, they just haven't gotten around to doing it yet. Don't
know where they live. For all I know they live right on the gulf coast and have
significantly more important things on their mind.
And a couple of others that might, if they get around to it.
It's all pretty time consuming, since I'm doing this in my spare time. A few
others are helping, but I seem to be doing most of the hunting. It was my idea,
so I guess I can't really complain....[grin] And it's not like I have to get
this done by any certain time.
Due to the weather, I doubt I'll get all that much done over the weekend. I
don't even live at the gulf coast, but the local weather guys are still saying
anywhere from 5 to 15 inches of rain. One suggested possibly even more,
depending on the path and circumstances. Just have to wait and see, I guess.
Anyway, yes, if you can find a full copy of Blitz, we would definetly like to
post it.
And yes, if you can scan in CrayBlitz, we'd like that too. Depending on the
quality of your OCR program, it should work out okay and the finished product
would be good enough. We wouldn't need the scan image itself. (I mention that
because when I did my scanning and OCR'ing, a couple of the ocr demo programs I
tried did not do too well at all.)
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