Today, I will be sharing an interesting topic. It’s about the greatest computer code that has been ever developed. The credits goes to David Horne who wrote this: 1K Chess Program on the ZX81. If you think this is nothing extraordinary or innovative, then just hold on for a moment! Think about that amount of memory for a moment 1 kilobyte=> 1024 bytes. Can you write down the rules of chess in less than one thousand characters? That’s a tricky task in itself. Fire up you favorite compiler, and build a minimal application. I’m guessing that its more than 1k in size, and it doesn’t do anything yet.
Wait a Moment, And it had AI. Not very tough AI mind you, but AI none the less. So not only could is display the board, verify the you’re moves according to the rules, and detect a win or a draw, but it could select moves for itself and play them.
I hope you have understood the complexity of the situation! If you still don’t understand, try implementing this on your own! With this note, I end this blog post 😀
See this link for the program
Note: If you want to play the chess game, there are emulators available. One such which I found convenient is ZX81 Emulator – Atari
FTP from: src.doc.ic.ac.uk /computing/systems/atari/umich/Emulators