[HN Gopher] The Greenblatt chess program (1967) [pdf]
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The Greenblatt chess program (1967) [pdf]
Author : pncnmnp
Score : 27 points
Date : 2023-02-24 21:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dl.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dl.acm.org)
| pncnmnp wrote:
| Surprised to see this on the front page! I also posted this on
| r/chess where someone pointed out that Fischer played against
| Greenblatt in the 70s. I digged a little deeper and found out
| that Greenblatt chess program was also known as Mac Hack
| (https://www.chessprogramming.org/Mac_Hack).
|
| Fischer did play against Greenblatt in 1978. Tracy Miller and
| Robert Hyatt talk about this in a 1999 chess forum called
| rec.games.chess.computer (https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.c
| hess.computer/c/W5CUj...):
|
| Miller writes:
|
| > Here is the game I have. At the time, Greenblatt was state of
| the art in chess computers, probably playing around expert
| strength. Bobby makes quick work of it. Note the nice knight
| sacrifice at move 10. 1. e4 e5 2. f4 exf4 3. Bc4 d5 4. Bxd5 Nf6
| 5. Nc3 Bb4 6. Nf3 0-0 7. 0-0 Nxd5 8. Nxd5 Bd6 9. d4 g5 10. Nxg5
| Qxg5 11. e5 Bh3 12. Rf2 Bxe5 13. dxe5 c6 14. Bxf4 Qg7 15. Nf6+
| Kh8 16. Qh5 Rd8 17. Qxh3 Na6 18. Rf3 Qg6 19. Rc1 Kg7 20. Rg3 Rh8
| 21. Qh6++ (1-0)
|
| To which Hyatt responds with:
|
| > Actually, mack hack was a 1500-level player. The first 'expert'
| program didn't show up until the late 1970's in the body of chess
| 4.x from Northwestern. Mack Hack dates to the late 60's and was
| highly selective. I used to have the source code for this thing
| many years ago (pdp 10 assembly language). It could search
| roughly 5 plies deep in tournament time controls, and typically
| searched 15 moves at ply=1/2, 9 moves at ply=3/4 and 7 at ply=5.
| Seems very selective, but the computers back then were very slow
| also.
|
| Here is the analysis of this game:
| https://lichess.org/study/QbZWFPLL/hrNBwilW
| homarp wrote:
| >a 1999 chess forum called rec.games.chess.computer
|
| that would be a Usenet newsgroup.
|
| https://chessforallages.blogspot.com/2015/06/early-chess-new...
| has a brief history
| tosh wrote:
| related: Shannon on Programming a Computer for Playing Chess
| (1950)
| https://vision.unipv.it/IA1/ProgrammingaComputerforPlayingCh...
| pncnmnp wrote:
| There is also Reconstructing Turing's "Paper Machine":
| https://en.chessbase.com/post/reconstructing-turing-s-paper-...
|
| The Google Docs link in this article is made private. However,
| Turing's original paper is available in "Faster Than Thought",
| page 288 onwards (https://archive.org/details/faster-than-
| thought-b.-v.-bowden...).
| marcodiego wrote:
| What I really would like to see explained: how chess for the
| Atari 2600 worked.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| More or less like Stockfish of today, most likely, except much
| more constrained:
|
| No parallel search. Much less reliance on lookup tables due to
| memory constraints. Simpler evaluation function.
|
| But fundamentally the architecture of engines in those days was
| more or less the same: alphabeta(or some variation of it), with
| quiescence search and a static evaluation function, likely
| using piece-square tables. Lookup these things on chess
| programming wiki for a more detailed exposition.
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(page generated 2023-02-25 23:00 UTC)