https://www.chessprogramming.org/Mac_Hack

Mac Hack VI incorporated a table of opening positions with selected replies. The opening book was compiled by two MIT students, Larry Kaufman, a chess master and top rated U. S. Junior player, and Alan Baisley a chess expert. It is noteworthy that Larry Kaufman started his computer chess career over 50 years ago as team member of Mac Hack! Quote from Oral History of Richard Greenblatt:

And it was compacted pretty efficiently. And you know, there was a – by later standards it wasn't so big, but at the time it was pretty good sized. I don't know I think it was probably 8,000 or 10,000 moves in there. He – Kaufman spent quite a while doing it. Of course, a number of the moves, you know, would – the game would just play it. There was very little chance of it actually staying in the book. You know, the – but I think Kaufman did a good job and he did – we did perceive some of the – well of course, one of the basic things about computer programs, really to the present day, is that they're very tactical. It's much easier for them to see that the tactics than the strategy. So what's called a closed position is hard for a computer. That's where all the pieces are blocking each other and it's very long maneuvering. Whereas, an open position which is sort of tactical combinations is much more to the computer's liking. So therefore, when designing the opening book, you want to kind of play offbeat and kind of unbalanced type openings that tend to lead to these closed position – open positions, which are then good for the computer. And so we realized that and you know, I think Kaufman did a fairly good job of ...

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Die ganze Welt des Computerschachs

War es nicht ein MacHack-Computer, gegen den Bobby Fischer einst eine kleine Miniserie hingelegt hatte (3:0), eine Serie, die seinen Fans Hoffnung gemacht hatte, dass er doch wieder zum organisierten Turnierschach zurückfände?

Gruß!

Ja, und auch gegen andere..

https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=159184

BTW. The Mac Hack VI above seems to be an early version of 1970.

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/dec...-110_Chess.pdf

Hallo Ihr Experten,
danke für das interessante Programm.

Könnte mir jemand verständlich erklären, wie ich es zum Laufen bringe unter Windoof 11?

Vielen Dank und ein schönes Wochenende
Beste Grüße
Michael

Ich bin schon ein Weilchen nicht mehr auf Windows..

Mit command-line / terminal ins Verzeichnis MacHackVI wechseln (cd ..) und pdp10.exe starten. Dann die weiteren paar Schritte im start.txt befolgen. Sollte ganz einfach sein.. So siehts dann aus (Fett sind Einzugebendes. ^C ist CTRL-C).

Hoffe damit klappts.

Beenden mit CTRL-E, dann CTRL-C.

PS. MacHack benötigt die (englische) deskriptive Notation!

DEMO

Hoffentlich hilft das...
MfG
Tibono

Ist ja schwieriger als Schach spielen ;-)

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Die ganze Welt des Computerschachs

Hi,
as it plays fast on modern hardware even at tournament setting, I gave a try to more depth and/or width. Sadly the deeper/larger the search, the higher the probability for a crash with a 'Push down list overflow' msg.

So I sticked to the usual tournament settings.

But a crash can still happen. I faced one after five games played without any issue, thus not a so often case.

The good news is I could easily resume the position and start a lower search (depth 5 instead of 6), get the Mac Hack move, increase again the search and complete the full game without anymore issue.

How to? I copied the TTY output of the game to a text editor to empty the unwanted output characters (such as _W prefix for moves played by the program as White), removed the play command (PW or PB) to ensure "referee mode", then pasted back into a new/clean CHESS program run. The CMD Windows lets you paste several lines that will feed the Mac Hack session. You then just need to set the appropriate level and enter PW or PB command to resume the search.

Should Michael (or anyone) want to test/reproduce, here is a TTY input for the position that crashed using tournament level:Just change the first line to SETD 5 for a safe run.

If any useful, the standard notation:

MfG,
Tibono