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David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)

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Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)

#21

Post by angersock »

ColinWright wrote: post #13
StavrosK wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.

The question asked exactly is the sort of thing that "the most trivial of web searches" wouldn't have answered as well as either of the replies already up.

One reply puts it into historical context, and educates the reader about the memory/persistence model of the ZX81.

The other reply points out that the lack of virtual memory and whatnot means that, in previous times, you needed to have the entire thing loaded into memory to execute something.

Without some digging and a knowledge of what to look for, those are non-obvious but useful points.

Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)

#22

Post by nsxwolf »

ColinWright wrote: post #13
StavrosK wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.

Must we obtain all information via dry web searches, and never from human exchange?

Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)

#23

Post by ymra »

VonGuard wrote: post #20

Just 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…

It may only have had 128 Bytes of RAM, but it used 4K ROM cartridges, even more than that if the cartridge used bank switching. So Atari 2600 programmes had quite a bit more room to fit inside.

Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)

#24

Post by blowski »

moron4hire wrote: post #18
3327 wrote: post #8

Holy 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...

Weeeell... The entire point of computers is to be able to do work that would be too tedious for humans. Computers exist so people can be lazy. Making better programming languages so programmers can be lazy is kind of the whole point of the job.

Exactly. For many, many projects nowadays, the project does not require a 1024 executable because RAM is cheap. Making code that's really easy to work with is just as impressive as this.

Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)

#27

Post by shubhamjain »

Amazing! it is hard to imagine to even barely scratch the surface with constraints like that. Sinclair ZX81 does seem to have an emulator[1], would it be possible to see it run? It seems the emulator would need a assembled binary, something I am not sure would be possible without whole lot of grunt work.

[1]: http://www.chuntey.com/

Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)

#28

Post by smoyer »

I have that program! The cassette it came on is still in my basement (along with a couple of ZX-81s and TS-2000s). While it might be rudimentary AI, I also didn't beat it every time (maybe not even half the time when I started playing against it).

Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)

#29

Post by SwellJoe »

illsorted wrote: post #25

Original source: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/8/10/12620/2164

Whoah, I'd almost completely forgotten Kuro5hin, and a lot of other people obviously have, too, as the site is a ghost town. It was a really neat pre-reddit user-generated social media site; kind of a more democratic Slashdot. I knew the founder in some capacity (I don't even remember how/why, now, or their name...maybe because I worked on Squid or because I worked in Perl), and used to advertise my old company on Kuro5hin to be able to send some money their way.

I quite liked it, and there was a brief time when I divided my time between Slashdot and Kuro5hin, as I currently divide my time between reddit and HN.

Re: David Horne's 1K Chess on the ZX81 (2001)

#30

Post by ctdonath »

ColinWright wrote: post #13
StavrosK wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.

Thing is, this context is way out of the norm for a great many HN readers. The notion of a general-purpose home computer without rapid-access storage, and hence without virtual memory, is so foreign to the younger crowd that the question is fair and the answer is almost unbelievable in their experience. There's nothing to prompt a web search, as what's being searched for is at odds with axiomatic presumptions.
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