Author: William H Rogers
Date: 07:06:18 11/22/99
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On November 21, 1999 at 06:39:15, David Blackman wrote: >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. > The smallest chess program written was Peter Jennings MicroChess. It was originally 1K long. After adapting it to the TRS=80, it grew to 4K to support graphics, etc. It was originally written for a hand held computer. Bill >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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