Olivier Poudade's BootChess claims to be the new record holder, 487-bytes of assembly:
http://mashable.com/2015/01/30/play-it-better-tiny-chess-gam...
David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)
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Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)
#32Kevlin Henney mentions this program in his talk "Cool Code". The whole talk is really worth watching.
Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)
#33Olivier Poudade has recently written and even smaller version of the chess program, clocking in at 468 bytes: http://olivier.poudade.free.fr/ http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31028787
Prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8954630
Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh wow, I didn't know that, thanks. By the way, to whomever downvoted a legitimate question: Nice.
I didn't downvote you, but you asked a question the answer to which is easily available with the most trivial of web searches. You assumed he meant "disk space", assuming the author made a mistake when you could easily have checked and not asked the question here. In some sense, it's not a legitimate question for this context.
its a 100% legitimate question. it was asked in good faith because the person asking it didn't know and wanted to know. its not a trivial web search either, because even knowing what to google for requires contextual knowledge that OP didn't have.
punishing a person for being ignorant while they are trying to learn and become less ignorant is terrible behavior.
Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)
#35Holy smokes... blown away. 1K RAM? less then most email's we write... Now'a days rockstars and Ninja's are the glorified ruby guys who "seemingly" do Ruby/django magic... This is what counts...This is the real deal...
this is an interesting historical artifact demonstrating the skill of one individual. its not "what counts", it was a low importance side project in its time, and is interesting today only as a piece of history, not for any lasting technology impact it had.
why you're using this as an excuse to take cheap shots at web developers is beyond me.
Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)
#36Thanks to the Archive, the code and commentary is available: https://archive.org/stream/your-computer-magazine-1982-12/Yo... https://archive.org/stream/your-computer-magazine-1983-01/Yo...
Oh, wow: there are issues of Your Computer on archive.org. Thanks. I loved that magazine.
Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)
#37Impressive, as is the recent smaller program from a French programmer.
Note, however, that both have sacrificed some rules. I believe they have both left out en passant, which is rare enough that it won't be missed most of the time. It's rare enough that if you use it against a casual player, there is a good chance they will accuse you of making it up.
Castling, however, which is also omitted, is much more serious. Getting castled is one of the top goals of the opening. It happens in nearly every game. Taking that out is huge.
Pawn promotion is missing from the older program but included in the smaller French program (making the French achievement even more impressive). I'd say that is not as big an omission as castling, because many games end before it gets to that point. Still, the threat of promotion has a major influence on endgame play.
So what we actually have are very impressive implementations of chess-like games. That raises the question of what is the smallest implementation of full chess?
I suspect that both these programs could be expanded to the full rules without making them a lot bigger, by taking the short cut of allowing the human to make those moves, but not the computer (especially if the computer trusts the human and does not check for legality of the human's move). I think you could defend a claim that you then have full chess, and it is just a limitation of the AI that it does not consider those moves.
Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)
#38Just for the record, the Atari 2600 also had a chess game with AI. It also had only 1024 bits of RAM, but it had access to all of it because there was no OS or underlying hardware support, like in the Speccy. So while this is definitely amazing, the 2600 version is very close in the "insanely well coded" category, especially because the 2600 had some SERIOUSLY quirky hardware to deal with. For example, on the 2600, y…
I read that chess was originally considered impossible to implement on the 2600, but there were promotional materials showing a guy playing chess on it and a customer complained that it wasn't available, so Atari went ahead and wrote it.
The graphics were horrible but the AI was actually pretty good, so we just used to set up a real board and mirror the moves on that.
Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)
#39Olivier Poudade's BootChess claims to be the new record holder, 487-bytes of assembly: http://mashable.com/2015/01/30/play-it-better-tiny-chess-gam...
Now if someone could arrange a competition between the two...
Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)
#40For the record, drawing on screen was poking bytes directly to the screen memory.