Stuart Cracraft

[hgm]

https://www.clydekraft.com/obituary/stu ... lyde-kraft

[Jjaw]

RIP to a computer chess pioneer and scientist.

[Ajedrecista]

Hello:

R.I.P. Please note that the obituary is more than four years old:

[...] died peacefully in his home on September 22, 2021. [...]

I did not know that he was the first author of GNU Chess (CPW article), that played a major role in my long-term project, which I incidentally started in the short three-month lapse between his last post at TalkChess and his death. He was also one of the very first registrations at TalkChess according to his profile.

I found the first thread of gnu.chess news group from September 21st, 1988 (link), no less! The first mention to him that I was able to find in a news group was at rec.games.chess in December 16th, 1986 (link), while the first post by him that I was able to find is also at rec.games.chess news group in April 30th, 1987 (link)... those news groups years with far less Internet usage than nowadays!

Quite a few people are looking for the source to a chess program that runs on Unix. The simple solution is to contact:
[...]

Ask them for "GNU Chess". This program is now *much* stronger than the original Unix chess.

Features include: iterative deepening, alpha-beta search with aspiration, transposition/hashing tables, large opening book, game history, game read-in, arbitrary position setup, X-window and SUN-window support, ability to use processors in parallel, free source code, complete documentation, etc.

Stuart Cracraft

Using processors in parallel back in 1987.

Regards from Spain.

Ajedrecista.

[hgm]

Well, I received an e-mail with the posted link only 6 days ago, and I had not seen it published here before. The mail was sent to the tcadmin account through the login page.