I followed the link...

Glad to hear you are out on parole.

I doubt if anybody (or thing) can answer the question 'who was/is the greatest chess player'.

But no harm done in setting a top of the range computer onto it. Just don't expect everyone to agree.

If God almighty himself appeared and stated who the greatest player there would always be someone (especially on here) to argue with him and in some cases make a valid point.

(The rows would get that bitter some would end up on God's ignore list)

Regarding a computer knowing what is and what is not a difficult position for a human is nigh impossible. It all depends on who they are playing.

How can you tell a machine that does not even know it is playing a game that it's opponent is a GM or a beginner.

When to start setting cheapo's tricks and traps in a lost position is beyond the top computers. They are too powerful, they cannot anticipate a bad move.

Yes what is the point, they can beat humans so why the need to cheapo humans, which I have no doubt they could do.

I bet in some famous lost games they could have muddied the waters if only we could let them - it must be frustrating for them. It can see a shot that turns the game into turmoil. No problem for it to thread it way through but impossible for a human. And yet it cannot play it. It has to follow the 'play the best move' routine.

See:

http://www.aol.com/article/2016/04/...

<In the world of Silicon Valley, there are few books held in higher esteem than "The Art of Computer Programming," a multi-volume set by Stanford professor emiritus Donald Knuth.

"If you think you're a really good programmer... read (Knuth's) Art of Computer Programming... You should definitely send me a résumé if you can read the whole thing," read a quote from Bill Gates on the cover of the third edition of the first volume.>>

• Everyone agrees that Knuth’s “literate programming” seemed like a pretty neat idea, but no-one had ever actually done it. (Er, except Knuth.)>

Everybody agrees they are a must read,
many pretend to have read them and very few actually did.

Linux and BSD are better than Windows.

<only one person had actually read it all the way through. (I don’t remember who, sorry).>

That depends on what you are going to use it for. As a desktop OS the different GNU/Linux distributions suck big time compared to OSX and Windows. The different GUI options are unstable, too heavy and even sometimes introduces stupid security issues.

That depends on what you are going to use it for. As a desktop OS the different GNU/Linux distributions suck big time compared to OSX and Windows. The different GUI options are unstable, too heavy and even sometimes introduces stupid security issues.>

The only reason I can think of for running Windows is if you want to play games. Videogame development is almost exclusively Windows-centric. For everything else I'd still pick GNU/Linux (personally, I use Funtoo for both the usual desktop stuff and programming). Incidentally, OSX, too, is based on BSD, ie it runs a proprietary interface on top of a BSD kernel.

The GNOME interface I've used on Mint and Ubuntu (on several different computers) sometimes crashes for no obvious reason. The kernel is still running, but all input devices dies so the only fix is a hard reset (pressing the power button for several seconds). This occasionally happens on Windows too, but in 9 out of 10 times, Windows is able to detect this and restart the Explorer GUI automatically.

At my previous work we also experienced several problems setting up a stable development environment with Ubuntu on some old but powerful Dell boxes.

Windows also has much more functionality built into the GUI and things like drag&drop and keyboard shortcuts are more advanced.

The security issue I was thinking about is not of a technical nature, but the stupid habit my Mint and Ubuntu boxes have after a boot. Usually it automatically fills in the user name of the last logged in user, so all I have to do is to give the password, but suddenly it "forgets" this and wants to have my user name too. When I don't recognize this, I type in my password visible for anyone to see. Not what you want in an open working environment. If this happened every time it wouldn't be an issue, but it's the random behavior that makes it a security issue.

I've worked on all three major desktop OS'es (and even some old mainframe systems) but I'm not locked into a particular environment. I pick my tools, whether it being the OS or a programming language, depending on what kind of work I have to do (if I'm allowed of course).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesli...

It's funny how little Lamport's wiki page talks about LaTeX.

Here's a link to Amazon's version of the TeX manual:

https://www.amazon.com/TeXbook-Dona...

I think LaTeX and TeX both used the same illustrator.

Alan Cox, recently recognized with an honorary degree by his old Alma mater, Swansea University:

http://www.swansea.ac.uk/graduation...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_...

The same rule applies for the Latin phrase "alma mater" - it should not be capitalised if it is not specific. ("My alma mater was books, a good library.")

<If you were that good, you would have created something better than "Windows" and Bill would be sending you his resume.>

As with Betamax/VHS, it isn't always the better version of anything that triumphs in the market. Sometimes aggressive selling and even dumb luck become more decisive factors than quality.

(If this were not so, do you think Microsoft's bloatware OSs would dominate?)

Already it has lost it's dominating position because of Android and *nix (including iOS/OSX). Gaming and other applications are moving to OS independent Internet technology. Consoles have taken large share of the gaming market. Data storage is moving to the cloud.

Very soon, the only computer we will have is our mobile phone. At home we will dock it get access to a keyboard and a bigger screen.

If Microsoft have courage, they could find a niche with a phone OS that put the user in the center and protects his privacy instead of selling his whole personal life on the market, as Google and Apple do.

It's shocking that we accept NO control over our most important computer which have access to a lot of our personal life like mail, friends, Internet habits, real-time location or real-time audio recording. Applications are starting up at will, multiple times if killed, and there are no way of stopping them - except with some specialized third party software - and they have free access to the all the data and all the functionality of the phone.

People are of course becoming very sloppy when installing well known software and doesn't hesitate to give it access to irrelevant data and functionality. Then there are all the pre-installed bloatware from Google and Apple themselves, for which you have no control at all.

The Book of Lean

288 bytes

https://leanchess.github.io/

In those early days both a small program size (due to the limited amount of memory available at the time) and efficiency (due to the slow computers available at the time) were highly prized, and the two were often incompatible. So the proper tradeoff between the two was the hallmark of a "good" program, even if it didn't produce the right result. Seriously. And programming "tricks" were essential in achieving both, even though it made the program unmaintainable, even by its originator. After all "Comments? I don't have to show you no stinking comments."

So my youthful self, as a chess enthusiast in high school, would have been highly interested in entering the race for having the smallest chess playing program. But I should mention that the first personal computer or at least the first commercial one, the Altair 8800 introduced in 1974, only had 256 bytes of memory, so LeanChess would not fit in it. Therefore 256 bytes would have been the obvious target for the smallest chess program. For more on the Altair 8800 see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDb... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5l..., although the latter is much longer and has a lot of historical and non-Altair 8800 stuff in it; the relevant stuff starts at 03:18 into the video.

I particularly liked the saving of space by using Os for bishops (and the imaginative rationale behind that) as well as the use of brown for the "light" squares. Clever.

I have mixed feelings about the implications of HG Muller's definition of a chess program and how it applies to LeanChess. As you pointed out, LeanChess does not satisfy HG Mulller's definition of a chess program since it does not implement legal moves that would likely occur in more than 50% of the games (I think that 51%, i.e. a majority, would be a better criteria, but that's not important), e.g. castling and 2-square pawn advance. For the others I suppose that it could resign whenever it encounters a move that it didn't understand such as a pawn promotion, en passant capture, and any game termination conditions (checkmate, stalemate, 3-fold repetition, and 50-move draw rule detection). Except for checkmate the others all together should occur less than 50% of the time.

But considering LeanChess to be a reasonable chess playing implementation given what it does and does not implement seems to make it somewhat subjective whether the size of a particular chess-playing implementation is a suitable candidate for the smallest chess playing program. I would suggest that perhaps indicating what does <not> need to be included in a chess playing program might help.

For example, following modern practice, LeanChess could separate its UX (user interface?) from the "chess engine", so the chess engine would not need to implement a display or prompts and any storage used for those would not need to be counted as part of LeanChess. All that a Minimal Chess Engine (MCE) would need to implement is a method for inputting the last move that an opponent played and provide the move that it decided to play to the UX. It may need to recognize a "Stop" command when the UX detects that the MCE has been checkmated or a draw situation has occurred. It might also need to recognize a 'Move' command from the UX for it to provide the best move that it has found to date as the next move that it will play. That way any synchronization between opponents and any time management features would be the responsibility of the UX. And the minimum required interface between the MCE and the UX could be defined as the Minimal Chess Interface (MCI) protocol and all MCE's must be compatible with it, although the definition of the codes transmitted could be left to each UX/MCE pair since they would both be implemented by the same person or team.

(Live) Computer rating list
http://computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/40...

@AylerKupp

I am not the inventor/coder of the program

  UX = User Experience (Design)
≠ UI = Usability/User Interface (Design)

'Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results'
https://sites.google.com/a/princeto...

Altair RAM cards were available
https://oldcomputers.net/altair-880...

'Just a thought' - I'm glad you enjoyed.

Content additions

A 19-year-old prodigy teaching others how to code

'.. Though the most difficult and enjoyable part of writing a program is the design of data structures and program flow, it is also important to use the least number of instructions possible to perform each function in a program. .. Sometimes the simple way of doing things is the best. ..'

https://altairclone.com/downloads/c...

from Computer Notes, Sept 1975, p.7 'Software Notes' (parent folder contains more issues)

Years later the 'kid' added

'.. Interviewer: How do you decide on the trade-offs between speed and performance?

Sometimes it’s a trade-off between adding features and executing really fast, but there are ways of having lots and lots of features and still making things fast. Basically you want to decide what the common cases are in a program, and make sure that they go straight through, that they don’t get bogged down with all these special case checks. If your main interactive loop has all sorts of checks in it, then your program is going to be slower than somebody else’s. ..'

https://programmersatwork.wordpress...

from 'Programmers At Work', by Susan Lammers (former Editor in Chief at Microsoft Press), 1989

Artwork and more can be found here
https://www.crummy.com/2008/02/17/0

For a in-depth outlook try 'Code Nation: Personal Computing and the Learn to Program Movement in America' by Michael J. Halvorson, 2020

A Brief History of Computer Chess

'.. By contrast, the system of natural language - English, French, Russian, what have you - seems vastly more complicated, more open-ended, and more human than any of the formal games we play. It's no wonder that computers have made scant progress on conversing with people, though they now routinely beat them at the rules-governed game of chess. The real lesson of computer chess, in other words, is not that computers are becoming intelligent like humans. Rather, the real lesson is that humans were smart enough - and machines became fast enough - to show that chess is actually mere computation. But for those human lovers of chess, at any rate, the game will continue, indefinitely. It's fun, after all. ..'

https://thebestschools.org/magazine...

from TheBestSchools.org by Staff, 2021

Unrelated
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd5...