Ask HN: have you written Chess games? Do you play Chess?

2 points·gsivil··3 comments

Two questions in one post, but hacking and chess seem similar activities.

I would be surprised to learn that there is no correlation.

What is your experience? Personally I got some books from my father when I was a kid and I loved the game for some time but is almost 20 years now that I have not played.

Today an article about Kasparov appeared in HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2054039

View on HN

The answers, yes, and no longer.

The inspiration for writing a chess program was a book by a guy called David Levy called 'computer gamesmanship' in the dark ages of personal computing.

A friend of mine (hi Gideon!) and myself wrote our own chess programs and had them compete. His was written in Pascal and very clean and easy to read, mine was in assembler and full of dirty tricks to make it faster to mask the lack of actual strategy beyond a materialistic approach.

Chess engines are fascinating to study for a lot of reasons. I've done a bit of tinkering with some of the open source programs available - check out Stockfish and Crafty for some very nice code to work with. If you dig into the computer chess scene, there has actually been a lot of heated drama about source code provenance of various proprietary and open programs like Rybka and the Ippolit family.

Honestly, I have to admit, I've never played a game of chess in my life, though I admire those who do.

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