Question about Program called Belle

[Carey]

The sources for the Bernstein Chess Program, the Kotov Chess Program, MacHack VI, TECH, etc., all lost in the mists of the past.

Alan Kotok's still exists. It's printed in his thesis. The printing is rather faded and hard to read in places, but it does exist. I was going to recreate it and get it running, but I was having too much trouble with the asm routines it used, plus the program wasn't interactive like they are now, but instead checked the computer's switches for moves. Which made things inconvenient.

(The link is on my site. http://classicchess.googlepages.com/Chess.htm )

The Kotok-McCarthy program is lost, though. Mr. McCarthy looked for it when I asked him, but he wasn't able to find a copy. He did suggest I find an assistant of his, but I couldn't find him.

Tech's source is lost, but Gillogly says the paper describes it pretty well, so it's not a total loss.

I tried contacting Atkin about Chess 3.6, but his email address is no longer valid. I was going to do a section on selective search programs and was hoping he either had a copy of the source or at least had a copy of his thesis which had a description of it.


Hyatt's Blitz program has been found, but the OCR of it is imperfect so it wont run right.

CrayBlitz's electronic source was finally found. Mostly. But Hyatt doesn't want to release it until he recreates the missing book stuff.

I've tried gathering up some of the other classics, but I have a lot of trouble even finding the right people. I'm not good at tracking the right people down.

I do have a couple authors who haven't gotten around to sending me their programs. And two others who have found their programs but would like to get them running before releasing. And a couple programs that were found, but the person wont release them without the author's permission, of course.

But mostly, I just can't find the authors.


If you have a favorite chess program you'd like found, feel free to try and find it. I'll post it on my site ( http://classicchess.googlepages.com/Chess.htm ) or maybe ComputeHistory.org might be interested, if it's important enough.

But somehow I'd say that a fifty years from now it will still be possible to download a copy of Crafty. Maybe locating the program will be an assignment in Software Archeology 101.

Says something about open source, doesn't it?

Not really.

Take MacHack VI, for example. It was technically closed, but Greenblatt gave out copies of the source to a number of people. And it still got lost in time.

Fifty years from now most of us will be dead or better off dead. Like Ozymandias, have you thought about what works of yours will survive?

[Tommy]

Yes. In mid-Summer, 1983, Cray built the prototype for the first dual-CPU machine, called the Cray-XMP2. We used that prototype in the WCCC that year and developed the first parallel version of Cray Blitz for that machine. We were searching something like 20K nodes per second by then, which was about 4x faster than Belle. Note that the 20K is an estimate. When I get to the office, I have an old file folder with various test results for most versions, so I can flip through that to see if I can find a more accurate NPS. Unfortunately most of it is on the old Texas Instruments thermal paper, which is not known for remaining readable for long periods of time.

Hi Bob,

It is my understanding that the Cray-XMP2 had a peek speed of 400 megaflops, so if we were to install Windows Vista on it, how many kiloflops do you think it could run at then?

Thanks,
Tom.

[Carey]

Hi Bob,

It is my understanding that the Cray-XMP2 had a peek speed of 400 megaflops, so if we were to install Windows Vista on it, how many kiloflops do you think it could run at then?

Thanks,
Tom.

Tommy;

I know you were joking. It's a popular joke.

However you need to remember that the Cray's were vector systems. In scalar computations they were much slower. Even Intel's micros just a few years later were faster.

In fact, I once did a numerical computation (involving FFT's based on modular arithmetic) on my Cyrix 486/66 faster than a Cray-2 did. He used vectors etc. and his algorithm was tuned for the Cray-2. I used scalar stuff and mine was tuned for the Cyrix 486/66. But they were similar algorithms. Comparable work was being done.

I'm not saying his program was perfectly tuned and mine was beating him in a fair race. I'm saying....

The Crays were hard to keep vectorized, plus they had more memory contention issues that you didn't have to deal with on a micro.

So for comparison to running Windows, you probably should consider it to a Pentium 1 system running Windows 95... There's no way it could have handled Vista!


If Bob had had a modern PDA or iPhone or netbook or something back then, he could have wiped the floor with every chess program for the next 5 years.

[bob]

Belle didn't count nodes, so they could not display node counts or NPS on the terminal, so Joe rigged up an integrating counter that essentially counted pulses per second. He hot-wired it to the chess hardware clock, as each major tick was one node. It was interesting to watch when he first hooked it up as nobody had gone that fast.

Interesting bit of trivia.

Bob, I've mentioned this to you before and I'll probably keep doing it occasionally.... but you really should write a book or at least create a blog of some sort and write down all these bits of trivia and tidbits from 40 years of chess programming & tournaments.

If Bob and others are fine with that, I would like to collect such stuff about Belle, Blitz etc. in the chess programming wiki. Of course Bob, Steven (all the Lisp stuff), you and others are welcome to write something in the cpw as well. So far I put some historic stuff and external links (images) inside the wiki. Please feel free to register there and to correct and edit things and to create new pages. If you don't like to become member there, for whatever reason, I would like to quote relevant posts in cpw with reference.

For instance I have collected links to the CCC-Archives of the Symbolic stuff, Steven posted a few years ago:
http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Symbolic

Critique and suggestions welcome...

Thanks,
Gerd

Anything I say can be added. But it should probably always be checked for accuracy. My computer chess activities go back 40 years now, and it is _really_ easy to screw up versions as I did with belle earlier in this thread (5K vs 160K).

However, I have had the pleasure of seeing some interesthing things, from talking at length with Claude Shannon, to Botvinnik at the 1983 WCCC event (I can tall you an embarassing story (from his perspective) )to you name it at the various ACM/WCCC events. Been a lot of fun...

[bob]

Yes. In mid-Summer, 1983, Cray built the prototype for the first dual-CPU machine, called the Cray-XMP2. We used that prototype in the WCCC that year and developed the first parallel version of Cray Blitz for that machine. We were searching something like 20K nodes per second by then, which was about 4x faster than Belle. Note that the 20K is an estimate. When I get to the office, I have an old file folder with various test results for most versions, so I can flip through that to see if I can find a more accurate NPS. Unfortunately most of it is on the old Texas Instruments thermal paper, which is not known for remaining readable for long periods of time.

Hi Bob,

It is my understanding that the Cray-XMP2 had a peek speed of 400 megaflops, so if we were to install Windows Vista on it, how many kiloflops do you think it could run at then?

Thanks,
Tom.

Only good thing about that comment is that I won't be wanting anything to eat tonight, just thinking about it...

BTW, another bit of trivia. The guys that came to UAB last year for the ACCA tournament got to see an actual part of the Cray XMP we used to win the 1983 WCCC event. When Cray "retired" that box, one of the "guys" up there called me and said "Bob, I was one of many that were watching those games from up here hoping we would win. If you want, we'd like to send you a module from that machine as it is being dismantled and recycled to extract all the copper and gold in it. I have a circuit board sitting in my office that is heavier than some desktop computers.

I probably should take a digital photo and put it on my web site, along with pictures of all the trophies in my office from those old events...

[bob]

The sources for the Bernstein Chess Program, the Kotov Chess Program, MacHack VI, TECH, etc., all lost in the mists of the past.

Alan Kotok's still exists. It's printed in his thesis. The printing is rather faded and hard to read in places, but it does exist. I was going to recreate it and get it running, but I was having too much trouble with the asm routines it used, plus the program wasn't interactive like they are now, but instead checked the computer's switches for moves. Which made things inconvenient.

(The link is on my site. http://classicchess.googlepages.com/Chess.htm )

The Kotok-McCarthy program is lost, though. Mr. McCarthy looked for it when I asked him, but he wasn't able to find a copy. He did suggest I find an assistant of his, but I couldn't find him.

Tech's source is lost, but Gillogly says the paper describes it pretty well, so it's not a total loss.

I tried contacting Atkin about Chess 3.6, but his email address is no longer valid. I was going to do a section on selective search programs and was hoping he either had a copy of the source or at least had a copy of his thesis which had a description of it.


Hyatt's Blitz program has been found, but the OCR of it is imperfect so it wont run right.

CrayBlitz's electronic source was finally found. Mostly. But Hyatt doesn't want to release it until he recreates the missing book stuff.

I've tried gathering up some of the other classics, but I have a lot of trouble even finding the right people. I'm not good at tracking the right people down.

I do have a couple authors who haven't gotten around to sending me their programs. And two others who have found their programs but would like to get them running before releasing. And a couple programs that were found, but the person wont release them without the author's permission, of course.

But mostly, I just can't find the authors.


If you have a favorite chess program you'd like found, feel free to try and find it. I'll post it on my site ( http://classicchess.googlepages.com/Chess.htm ) or maybe ComputeHistory.org might be interested, if it's important enough.

But somehow I'd say that a fifty years from now it will still be possible to download a copy of Crafty. Maybe locating the program will be an assignment in Software Archeology 101.

Says something about open source, doesn't it?

Not really.

Take MacHack VI, for example. It was technically closed, but Greenblatt gave out copies of the source to a number of people. And it still got lost in time.

Fifty years from now most of us will be dead or better off dead. Like Ozymandias, have you thought about what works of yours will survive?

I used to have a copy of Greenblatt's program (source). And Coko IV. And Chaos. And chess 4.something First was PDP asm, next 2 were Fortran, last was CDC asm. But they were on 2400' computer tapes that were lost 20-30 years ago depending on which one. Wish I had thought about backups. But the problem was every media we have ever used has become obsolete. 2400' reels, then the cartridge tapes from 30mb up, to zip drives, etc... I do have copies of current stuff on DVD but they don't have a long lifetime. And they will be obsolete in a few years and hard to find devices to read.

[sje]

I used to have a copy of Greenblatt's program (source). And Coko IV. And Chaos. And chess 4.something First was PDP asm, next 2 were Fortran, last was CDC asm. But they were on 2400' computer tapes that were lost 20-30 years ago depending on which one. Wish I had thought about backups. But the problem was every media we have ever used has become obsolete. 2400' reels, then the cartridge tapes from 30mb up, to zip drives, etc... I do have copies of current stuff on DVD but they don't have a long lifetime. And they will be obsolete in a few years and hard to find devices to read.

Somewhere there just might be a 2,400 foot seven track tape with the source of a compiler I wrote back in the 1970s; if not, I still have the hard copy on line printer paper.

Fortunately, things have changed with the advent of the Internet and cheap mass storage. One posted, source files today will be still be around long after the machines that compiled and ran them are gone.

[GenoM]

This story sounds like a story from a previous universe.
It has some magic in it...

Regards,
Geno

[Carey]

I used to have a copy of Greenblatt's program (source). And Coko IV. And Chaos. And chess 4.something First was PDP asm, next 2 were Fortran, last was CDC asm. But they were on 2400' computer tapes that were lost 20-30 years ago depending on which one. Wish I had thought about backups. But the problem was every media we have ever used has become obsolete. 2400' reels, then the cartridge tapes from 30mb up, to zip drives, etc... I do have copies of current stuff on DVD but they don't have a long lifetime. And they will be obsolete in a few years and hard to find devices to read.

Shame about MacHack VI and CoKo....

Mr. Koz. says he no longer has CoKo and doesn't remember anything about it. At least a paper was published about it, and it can be reposted for non-profit reasons.

As for the tapes, there are people on the web and Univs. that still have the antique equipment needed to recover data from tapes. That's how a lot of antique stuff gets recovered.


As for DVD backups... Well, there are some that are supposed to have a much longer life than the normal ones we tend to use. I think (but don't hold me to this), the RW disks have a longer life than just the write once ones, due to the differences in the materials. (Although they tend to be more easily scratched, for some reason.)

Plus whenever I put stuff onto disk, I always create a PAR2 archive for it. It's an error correcting method where you can create an extra X% of data to recover any that gets damaged.

For most stuff, I just do 2% but for anything important 10% is better.

[bob]

I used to have a copy of Greenblatt's program (source). And Coko IV. And Chaos. And chess 4.something First was PDP asm, next 2 were Fortran, last was CDC asm. But they were on 2400' computer tapes that were lost 20-30 years ago depending on which one. Wish I had thought about backups. But the problem was every media we have ever used has become obsolete. 2400' reels, then the cartridge tapes from 30mb up, to zip drives, etc... I do have copies of current stuff on DVD but they don't have a long lifetime. And they will be obsolete in a few years and hard to find devices to read.

Somewhere there just might be a 2,400 foot seven track tape with the source of a compiler I wrote back in the 1970s; if not, I still have the hard copy on line printer paper.

Fortunately, things have changed with the advent of the Internet and cheap mass storage. One posted, source files today will be still be around long after the machines that compiled and ran them are gone.

ugh. Actually we used 2400 9-track. damned univac machines liked 6 bit stuff however.