Ribbit,
a computer chess program written at the University of Waterloo by a team of the undergraduate students Ron Hansen, Jim Parry, Russell Crook, later joined by Gary Calnek. Ribbit was one of the strongest programs in the mid 70s, tied second place at the WCCC 1974 and was winner of the ACM 1974 a few months later with a last round win against Chess 4.2. Its successor, called Treefrog became second one year later at the ACM 1975.
My time at Waterloo greatly benefited from the presence of Ron Hansen. He was author of Ribbit (later called Treefrog), one of the strongest chess programs around. He generously gave me a copy of his program, which I used to learn how to write a chess program... Hansen's program was written in a computer programming language called Fortran. For my master's thesis, I translated it into the Z programming language (similar to the well known C programming language).
From the team of undergrads who authored Ribbit, Ron Hansen went on to write his master thesis on computer chess, and eventually Prof. Van Emden became an expert in computer chess and endgames.
During the first decade of the computer chess championship, Chess X.X failed to win only twice. On the first occasion, in 1974, Chess 4.2 was upset by Ribbit, a Canadian program by Jim Parry, Ron Hansen, and Russell Crook of the University of Waterloo. Ribbit had unexpectedly reached the final after opponents failed to press their advantages. In previous encounters, Ribbit had lost twice to Chess 4.X, but now avenged these losses in the deciding game of the championship by employing a standard tactic of human masters: the prepared opening line...
a computer chess program written at the University of Waterloo by a team of the undergraduate students Ron Hansen, Jim Parry, Russell Crook, later joined by Gary Calnek. Ribbit was one of the strongest programs in the mid 70s, tied second place at the WCCC 1974 and was winner of the ACM 1974 a few months later with a last round win against Chess 4.2. Its successor, called Treefrog became second one year later at the ACM 1975.
Ribbit was written in Fortran and ran on a Honeywell 66/60 36-bit mainframe computer.
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Jonathan Schaeffer
From Jonathan Schaeffer (1997, 2009). One Jump Ahead. 1. This Was Going to Be Easy, pp. 7Alejandro López-Ortiz
From An Introduction to Computer Chess [3] :George Atkinson
George Atkinson in Chess and Machine Intuition [4]:Games vs Chess 4.0
WCCC 1974
ACM 1974
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