Saturday 6 July 2013

Size isn't everything

While hunting around for some good open source javascript programs I came across the following bit of genius/insanity. It is a chess program called Toledo and it consists of 1024 bytes of Javascript code. In fact there are 2 versions, one of which does not allow en-pas,castling or promotion (Picochess), and a slightly larger version that implements all the rules (Nanochess).
Of course for a program of this size it does not play particularly well, and I was able to find some very quick checkmates. It seems to meet 1.d4 with 1. ... f5 and I have then won a couple of games with the general idea of 2.c4 h5 3.e3 g5? 4.Be2 g4 5.h3 gxh 6.Bxh5+ Rxh5 7.Qxh5#
Nonetheless it it is still an impressive feat to get it to play at all. If you want to try it online then you can also play it here.

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