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Comment by danmaz74 | Hacker News Reader

I started developing software as a kid on a Commodore 64, and I thought we were pretty clever if we were able to accomplish interesting things using only 32KB of RAM. But the idea that somebody was able to develop a full chess engine using only 128 Bytes of RAM boggles my mind.

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Imagine how easy it would be to tell people “Hey sorry we can’t include that feature, there’s not enough RAM” and then you could just build what you wanted to, exactly.

Think of the 128 bytes RAM to be only used for your dynamic gameplay state variables.

C64 (and other home computer) games had to load all code and data into RAM, which usually accounts for most RAM usage. Game consoles like the Atari 2600 stored the code and static data in a ROM cartridge.

For simple arcade-style games (like Pacman), 128 bytes of RAM is more then enough to manage the gameplay state.

(still of course: a chess engine in 4 KByte ROM and 128 bytes RAM is pretty damn impressive)

Fitting a chess game state in 128 bytes is for sure doable; what is really impressive is being able to use the same memory not just for the current position, but also to compute the next moves in a decent way.

I wonder if it "looks ahead" anything at all, or if it's just evaluating the current turn's piece trade potential. If it does look ahead, I wonder how many bytes per turn of lookahead is needed.

By the way: right now I'm working on a chess training project(1), and I'm thinking that a marketing cofounder could really help. If anybody is interested, my contact info is in my profile.

(1) https://chess.braimax.com

Looks neat.

Better call the puzzle training something else than Puzzle Rush though.

> Looks neat.

Thank you.

> Better call the puzzle training something else than Puzzle Rush though.

Why? I think it's the most recognised name for the sequence of puzzles becoming harder and harder, even if I removed the time limit (as that leads to not learning much :)

It’s trademarked.

I tried it out, was enjoyable to play a few puzzles. My feedback is a) that the ring sound (when you win a puzzle) was too loud, so I ended up muting the tab, and b) that the logo looks like "BraiMax", and doesn't stylistically fit with the rest of the site theme.

Thank you for your feedback! By the way, you can disable sound from the little cog icon just above the chessboard.

I'd recommend changing the sounds up a bit. The piece moves sound more like doors locking or unlocking from FPS games in the 90's. And the bell... just doesn't sound "successful chess puzzle" to me.

I'm no UX engineer at all, but the sounds just do not sound chess-y. Just a thought.

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