In Round 3, Tech 2 versus Ribbit, Tech 2 had a number of forced mates to choose from and 45 minutes at its disposal for the next 18 moves. One beginning with 23. Qg6 and the others, slightly longer, beginning with 23. Rc2. Possibly confused by the multiplicity of wins available, Tech 2 thought and thought and thought and ... finally it lost on time without making another move [3] .
Following is Truscott's description of his first tournament (with Duchess ed.) and how he met one of the most respected programmers in the Unix community during that tournament. Truscott writes:
There were twelve teams competing in the tournament. We were on a stage in a large room with seating for spectators. Each team had a computer terminal (something like a dot-matrix printer with a keyboard in front and an acousticmodem on the back). And a telephone. Boy were those phone calls expensive. But the ACM was picking up the tab, and Duke was giving us the computer time.
At the 1974 tournament, we knocked off MIT'sTECH-II in the first round. They had come in second the previous year, and we were a newcomer, so that was something of an upset. In the second round we got clobbered by the perennial champ, CHESS 4.0 from Northwestern University.
In the third (fourth ed.) round we played Bell Labs'Belle. It was called T. Belle at that point. I had met the author earlier, before the second round, when he showed me how good his program was at solving mating problems. I wasn't that interested in chess, but humored him while he pulled a chess position out of a library and had the program find a mate in 5 (or some such). I guess if I actually played chess I would have been impressed.
So when the third round began, Bruce Wright and I were on one side of a table, and Ken Thompson and someone else from Bell Labs (who years later I realized was Brian Kernighan), were on the other. I noticed that when Ken Thompson logged on, the Bell Labs computer printed:
Chess tonight, please don't compute.
I mentioned that that was really neat to be able to get the comp center to put out a notice like that. He said something non-commital in response. So the game began. A few hours and a few thousand dollars later we really had Belle on the ropes. All it had left was a lone king and we were about to queen a pawn! But then our program ABENDed (core dumped) in a way that caused the phone line to drop. We dialed back in and set things up, same thing. Every so often it would actually make a move. But making the phone call was slow (we had to ask for an outside line from the hotel operator) and painful (rotary dial you know) and eventually our program lost on time.
After the tournament was over, Truscott and Wright examined what had happened and they observed that the problem was not with their program, but rather with a bug in the TSO operating system on their mainframe. "Thus was our mighty mainframe slain by a minicomputer," he admitted, as they had lost the competition because the operating system of their mainframe computer had proven inferior to the operating system of the mini computer used by the Bell Labs Team. "But I didn't realize it was UNIX," Truscott recalls, noting that the victory went to the Bell Labs team and their mini computer because of the power of the Unix operating system.
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The ACM's Fifth North American Computer Chess Championship (NACCC) was held from November 10-12, 1974, San Diego, California, USA.
Final Standing
[1] [2]Participants
Fred Swartz, William Toikka, Joe Winograd
Russell Crook, Gary Calnek
Selected Games
Losing on Time
In Round 3, Tech 2 versus Ribbit, Tech 2 had a number of forced mates to choose from and 45 minutes at its disposal for the next 18 moves. One beginning with 23. Qg6 and the others, slightly longer, beginning with 23. Rc2. Possibly confused by the multiplicity of wins available, Tech 2 thought and thought and thought and ... finally it lost on time without making another move [3] .[Event "ACM 1974"] [Site "San Diego, CA"] [Date "1974.11.11"] [Round "3"] [White "Tech 2"] [Black "Ribbit"] [Result "0-1"] 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.Nc3 Nc6 4.d4 Nf6 5.Bc4 cxd4 6.Nxd4 Nxd4 7.Qxd4 e5 8.Qd3 Bd7 9.O-O Be7 10.Bg5 Qb6 11.Bxf6 Bxf6 12.Nd5 Qc5 13.Nxf6+ gxf6 14.Bd5 Bc8 15.Rfe1 O-O 16.Re3 a5 17.Rae1 h5 18.Rg3+ Kh7 19.Qf3 Bg4 20.Qxf6 Qb4 21.Rc3 Qxb2 22.Bxf7 d5 0-1 {time}Winning with the Lone King
Round 4, Duchess vs. T. BelleGame and analysis from Lichess
Quote from Michael [4] and Ronda Hauben's netbook Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet [5] [6] :
After the tournament was over, Truscott and Wright examined what had happened and they observed that the problem was not with their program, but rather with a bug in the TSO operating system on their mainframe. "Thus was our mighty mainframe slain by a minicomputer," he admitted, as they had lost the competition because the operating system of their mainframe computer had proven inferior to the operating system of the mini computer used by the Bell Labs Team. "But I didn't realize it was UNIX," Truscott recalls, noting that the victory went to the Bell Labs team and their mini computer because of the power of the Unix operating system.
Battle for First Place
Ribbit vs Chess 4.2Game and analysis from Lichess
See also
Reports
External Links
References
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