I’ve just stumbled upon (via a post in John Cook’s blog) an old article back at kuro5hin entitled the greatest program ever written. It describes 1k chess on the ZX81, a program capable of playing chess on the Sinclair ZX81, a computer endowed with a total memory of 1024 bytes, and written by David Horne. I didn’t believe it either, until i saw it by myself. Kids these days!
Update:I’ve just learnt, thanks to a comment below, that there’s actually an earlier chess program, written by Peter Jennings, of similar characteristics: Microchess for the Kim-1 computer. The linked webpages contain lots of information about the program, including listings. Pretty fun stuff.
January 8, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Peter Jennings got there a few years earlier with an equally remarkable but slightly larger 1k chess for the KIM-1 – see http://www.benlo.com/microchess/microchess8.html