24k #8 -- Black and White

Our 8th installment in 24 x 24k for 2024 isn’t going to work for you properly without JavaScript turned on. If you’re a mailing list reader, try the web version. Speaking of user interfaces, the user interface for chess has been evolving for more than a thousand years, so why should it not also change in the browser?

Wikipedia says that graphical chess in the browser first appeared in 1995. This would astonish me if it took that long, given that the marquee platform for the original web was the NeXT system with a high-resolution monochrome display.

Browser chess was far from the first computer chess, though. People who are serious about arguing about chess have opinions about when computer chess first turned up but it’s a safe bet that it turned up as soon as there was a spare moment to think about computers and leisure together. You may as well ask when was the first cigarette smoked after World War 2 and who first had the idea. Maybe there is some International Cigarette Enthusiasts Federation that ponders such things. If there is, you can be sure that there are also heated arguments about whether that first one was really rolled sufficiently well and with an adequately orthodox tobacco to really be a match-grade smoke.

Most of the early computer chess systems dispensed with the board. Chess notations had already been in use for more years than computers have now been in use, both for transcribing games and for chess by correspondence. You can easily imagine an early computer spitting out moves by teletype. You can probably also imagine Alan Turing imagining a computer playing chess this way and him imagining further that he might not be able to tell the difference between a computer and a person.

People (I presume they are people) still think about distinguishing humans from computers by their chess play. For some, it represents the promise of computing. For others it represents an insidious erosion of humanity and, more importantly, of chess. The very worst kind of performance-enhancing drug. Ironically, more computing cycles may now have been spent on automated chess analysis to numerically verify the humanity of moves than have been spent on computer moves in tournament play.

Things were simpler in the 80’s. For cross-country games, chess cost a postcard stamp a move — ten cents in 1980. That’s about the same as a minute of dial-up time on CompuServe at a discounted evening rate. Correspondence moves were frequently made in consultation with chess reference books, not with algorithmic oracles.

Books of this type are computation made visible. Of work made visible.

While the most imaginative of the computer scientists imagined computing coming to chess and the pessimistic of the chesserati feared computing coming for chess, neither really had too much to do with the other. I mean no disrespect, but the two groups really don’t get along all that well. In general, the computer scientists tended to underestimate the complexity of chess or anything else within the grasp of a child. The chess crowd came to an early sort of draw with computers before the matter was decided. In fact, the computer won the game and that‘s still not end it. For the most suspicious, there will always be a computer under every weighted and felted bottom.

While computers and chess met first in the laboratory and then almost-over-the-board in tournament play, they spent formative years together in living rooms. Just as the 19th century Staunton set brought cheap and easily-produced chess sets to anyone who cared to play, the microprocessor brought a credible game. This is where the underestimation of the computing crowd and the skepticism of the grandmaster circuit left space for the ingenuity of the toy maker. Starting in about 1980, Radio Shack was selling computerized chess toys that were close the skill of the average home player and which were much less expensive, at around $120, than even the anemic home computers of the era. For comparison, a Tandy Color Computer from Radio Shack cost $399 at the time. Most of these early systems accepted and produced moves as notation or through an array of LED lights and sensors corresponding to the board. On-screen chess in the home had a similar gait. 1979 saw Video Chess. This was a four kilobyte cartridge for the Atari VCS that provided on-screen play using no more RAM than the 128 bytes in the console. Video Chess was no speed demon. At its most advanced level of play, it could take ten hours for each move. Well, by the standards of correspondence chess this is pretty fast. The $40 price for the cartridge would buy you only 400 moves by contemporary post card. I would guess that the average owner played that only that many moves with the thing before moving on.

By the mid 80’s, dedicated computer chess sets had upped their game considerably, though their microprocessors were generally similar to earlier machines, and to the microprocessors still running the remaining 8-bit microcomputers. The difference was the explosion of inexpensive memory.

Our machine for this installment is the beneficiary of this shift. The SciSys Kasparov Turbo S-24K puts its memory size right in the name. 24k! 16 of those kilobytes are read-only and the remaining 8 go both ways. Mr. Turing may not have invented computer chess but we can rely on his intuition that a big enough read-only memory is as good as one that goes both ways. Chess is so suited to read-only play that books of chess openings and transcribed tournaments have been available for centuries.

SciSys later became Saitek, a name still familiar to both computer and over-the-board players for their chess machines and clocks. The S-24K is one of many machines of the era to borrow a grandmaster’s name. Peter Jennings, author of the Micro Chess program for small microcomputers, adapted his program into the Commodore ChessMate in the late ’70s and recounts its development here. He had wanted that machine to be called ‘Bobby’, for Bobby Fisher and wound up introducing Fischer to his machine in hopes that he might secure an endorsement. Fisher arrived with another machine in tow — the Boris machine named for Boris Spasky.

These recreational chess engines all took less space than this post and they were better chess players than me to boot. This post has made me nostalgic for my own boyhood portable chess computer (from RadioShack, naturally) but no more interested in chess as an adult game.

This post pairs well with the prescient ‘Picture This‘ / ’Parallel Lines’ / Blondie, 1978

”Get a pocket computer
Try to do what you used to do yeah”