On 05/25/2017 10:04 AM, Michael Black wrote:
On Thu, 25 May 2017, Ancel B wrote:

Oh, well. I still have some RS parts on the blue card in the plastic
bubble from 1979. Plus I have all 3 of the Transistor projects DIY
books from Forrest Mimms and I built almost all of the projects. As a
14 yr old, with no internet, the projects were the only way to learn.

The most fun was the DC to DC converter that could zap people.

I also still have the portable Tandy / RS chess computer with 8
levels.I don't think it works, but I suppose I could get in there and
fix it.Never opened it to see if the chips were socketed etc. I got up
to level 6 which took a looong time to make a move. Several hours
sometimes.

And it's probably not the software that's slow, but the processor.

I don't know when it came out, but I suspect it was an 8 bit cpu, which
likely ran at best 2MHz. Compare that with this computer, a Pentium
running at 3GHz, and I bet the same program would give results in a
blink on this (if only the program ran on a Pentium).

Michael


Additionally good modern chess programs use lots of different heuristics
to evaluate board positions while avoiding traversing large areas of the
search space.

The Tandy just doesn't have enough memory to store all the tables.