Author: David Blackman
Date: 03:39:15 11/21/99
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On November 20, 1999 at 13:59:36, KarinsDad wrote: >I had an old monochrome TRS-80 with 4K of memory. This was in the late 70s. I >doubt you could write any chess program then in 4K, but maybe somebody managed >it. I think the record for small programs was a dedicated chess computer with 2.25KB program ROM and 256 Bytes RAM. I think it had a 6800 chip (not 68000). It might have been called "Mike". It was kind of ok strength wise. A bit weaker than early versions of Sargon. I think that was really impressive because i can't figure out how it was done. One weekend, i wrote a small chess program in C. I think the smallest binary version of it was a shade over 4KB for PDP-11 Unix. To run, it needed about 5K including data and stack. (Plus the Unix operating system which needed lots of ram just for itself.) It played vaguely sensible opening and midgame and saw shallow tactics ok, but the endgame was incredibly weak. So i can see how to fit in 4K i think. Rewriting in assembler i could probably do that. But getting much smaller would be tough.
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