What got you into computer chess?

[lkaufman]

I was America's top rated Junior while a student at M.I.T. and showed an interest in "Project MAC", the first chess computer to compete in human chess tournaments (in 1967). So they asked me to join the team and then of course I was hooked. Now more than half a century has passed and now I'm America's top rated player over age 70, still I'm very involved with computer chess. Seems my interests haven't changed very much!

[smatovic]

What got you into computer chess? Battle Chess, a love of programming, and no chess set.

In 1988 my brother convinced my dad to buy an home computer,
but to make sure he will buy one my brother chose the cheaper model,
the Atari 800 XE with datasette instead of an Commodore C64 with floppy drive,
that was the reason we could not exchange games with our friends,
cos everybody had an C64 and the stores around had only little Atari supply.

So we had only a couple of games and had to type in BASIC listings from computer
chess magazines to run programs. I think that was one reason i wished to become
a programmer, to be able to write my own chess program for the Atari.

--
Srdja

[mclane]

Programing on the basic of the vc20 and vc64 was horrible. The basic had horrible special characters for graphics that was disturbing.

[JVMerlino]

I got a Chess Challenger 7 when I was young, and I showed some interest in the game but couldn't find anybody to play with. More than 20 years later I was very fortunate to be placed on the Chessmaster development team, and to stay there for several years/versions (late in the CM5500 dev stage through the end of CM9000). Best job I ever had.

[Tdunbug]

For me it was analyzing my OTB games in my youth and seeing how bad I really was at chess. With the help of engines I learned to play better chess i.e helping me see tactics quicker. In the present, it is the TCEC and other computer competitions that peek my interest because I love to see the development of new engines.

[flok]

My best friend at that time (90s) had the same homecomputer as I had: an MSX made by philips, a VG8020.
He was an avid chess player (rip).
As an experiment we let our computers play against each other with the same chess program, ultra chess (see also https://vanheusden.com/cchess/UC/), white won.
Great fun.
He and his father had all kinds of chess programs and chess computers.


(A month ago I interfaced an MSX emulator playing UltraChess to an UCI program, https://vanheusden.com/misc/blog/2018-09-08.php)

[Richard Allbert]

Discovering the world of chess engines at university in 2002.

I started the university chess club, so I was interested in chess (but not a good player) - I remember seeing Arasan, playing with that, and then finding Dann Corbit's old (massive) repo with Beowulf and other engines.

I bought 'teach yourself C++ in 24hrs' and many months later the slowest, most awful engine was running. Then I started looking at the code of other engines, realized I was doing it very wrong, and took a lot from others to make Lime ( a mess), then Jabba ( a bit better). I've had many many hours of fun writing tuners, guis, tests, all sorts. It's addictive.

One of the highlights for me was taking part in Richard Pijl's tourment in Holland. Met so many of you, it was a great experience.

Last few years, family and work have limited my time, and as I'll never be a good coder, or make a strong engine for that matter, I've since tried to give a little back to the wonderful community in other ways.

[grahamj]

AlphaZero. I have a longstanding interest in machine learning, but little interest in chess except as a computational challenge. AlphaZero led to LC0 then to an interest in CUDA programming, and now I'm working on a chess engine which uses a GPU to do the last few plies of search. As I said to Srdja in an email, I'm learning CUDA anyway.

[smatovic]

AlphaZero. I have a longstanding interest in machine learning, but little interest in chess except as a computational challenge. AlphaZero led to LC0 then to an interest in CUDA programming, and now I'm working on a chess engine which uses a GPU to do the last few plies of search. As I said to Srdja in an email, I'm learning CUDA anyway.

Considering less than a year of LC0 development,
and LC0, Scorpio and Skipper as known WIP,
there is sure enough room for alternative NN gpu approaches,
bon chance Graham.

--
Srdja