I had that! Only clear memory is once it had its queen on d7 and king on e8, with the e-pawn not having moved yet. I found Bxf7+ and Ne5+ winning the queen. I was as proud as if I'd won the Immortal Game.

One big problem old engines and patzers of all ages have is not really understanding the openings they memorize. I assume the Greenblatt program was playing "book" up through 6....0-0. But then it's on its own, and plays two second-rate moves in a row, ...Nxd5 and ...Bd6, at which point it's already pretty much lost. Neither one of those moves is visibly awful, though, and I can see a decent but underprepared human player making them. At at that point, after 9.d4, you either give back the pawn and concede your opponent a powerful pawn center + the f-file, or try to hang on to the pawn. If you're human and you know you're playing Bobby Fischer, you probably do the former; if you're a computer and don't even know you're playing chess, you pick ...g7-g5.

Highly doubtful.>

From the chessgames GreenBlatt page:

<it acheived a USCF rating of 1243 in 1966>

Of course we don't know who it played after that, and if any improvements were made.

<No, 1200 baud modems were introduced in 1972>

Did they have modems where the phone line plugs in like today?

I only remember Ken Thomson using
"acoustic" modems.
(Id imagine a direct connection was more reliable vs "listening" and "speaking" your signals audibly)

Ken also had the first board I saw
that lit up the square of the piece you move and where it was going.

It was about 4 inches off the table to
accommodate the electronics. The pieces
were normal wooden pcs. However, if you looked on the bottom, the felt was off, the wood was gouged out, and crystals were epoxied in. When the board was scanned with Rf, the resonate frequency of the crystals told Belle what the position on the board was.

<Also see my "analysis" of the remote move transmission: Geller vs Fischer, 1965>

I played on the National Chess League.
(Telephone) There were 4 Boards, each board had a "runner" who would play the verbally transmitted move on your board(your response would be taken by your runner for verbal transmission to their runner).

I've heard it said Fischer was
handicapped due to longer/slower games.
From my standpoint, that was more than made up for by more time on the clock. We were updated on times every 10 moves. There were 20/40 minute periods where I actually used 2 mins on my clock. Since Fischer was one of the fastest players in the world, the time lag probably helped his opponents more.

With Fischer, you also needed to redefine "transmission error."

In the endgame it's almost impossible to lose to it.>>

Were those "stand alone" chess computers with an actual board?

This is a move by a player who (which) thinks he (it) has the initiative.

You're probably right, I don't know how I could have missed that. Thanks for setting me straight!

WHAT !!! Did you actually used the phrase "<arguably> the greatest Chess Player ever <in his prime>." ????? Are you feeling all right? Or are you mellowing in your old age? Please don't.>

Ok I maybe had some kinda fainting fit there ! lol lol

I think he is talking about Greenblatt who after this game went onto claim that Humans had fixed World Chess.>

The Greenblatt program (actually MacHack VI) was definitely rated. In fact, according to Greenblatt (Computer), It was the first program to play in a tournament against humans and achieved a chess rating, 1243 in 1966. It played under the pseudonym "Robert Q". And according to https://www.computerhistory.org/col... it achieved a rating of 1400 in Feb. 1967. A paper published in 1969 (https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/ha...) indicates that its rating was advancing quickly, reaching 1450 in Apr 1967.

It was also the first program to draw and then win a game against a human player in tournament play (https://www.chess.com/article/view/...).