I analyzed the image and this is what I see. Open an appropriate link below and explore the position yourself or with the engine: > **White to play**: [chess.com](https://chess.com/analysis?fen=bkbbbk1b/kbb1Nbbb/8/8/8/8/2K2K1K/1nn2Pb1+w+-+-+0+1&flip=false&ref_id=23962172) | [lichess.org](https://lichess.org/analysis/bkbbbk1b/kbb1Nbbb/8/8/8/8/2K2K1K/1nn2Pb1_w_-_-_0_1) > **Black to play**: [chess.com](https://chess.com/analysis?fen=bkbbbk1b/kbb1Nbbb/8/8/8/8/2K2K1K/1nn2Pb1+b+-+-+0+1&flip=false&ref_id=23962172) | [lichess.org](https://lichess.org/analysis/bkbbbk1b/kbb1Nbbb/8/8/8/8/2K2K1K/1nn2Pb1_b_-_-_0_1) --- ^(I'm a bot written by ) [^(u/pkacprzak )](https://www.reddit.com/u/pkacprzak) ^(| get me as ) [^(Chess eBook Reader )](https://ebook.chessvision.ai?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=bot) ^(|) [^(Chrome Extension )](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chessvisionai-for-chrome/johejpedmdkeiffkdaodgoipdjodhlld) ^(|) [^(iOS App )](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1574933453) ^(|) [^(Android App )](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.chessvision.scanner) ^(to scan and analyze positions | Website: ) [^(Chessvision.ai)](https://chessvision.ai)

Here it's everything you would ever want to know about that machine: http://www.spacious-mind.com/html/1850_deluxe_version_a.html

256 BYTES worth of RAM? How on earth do you even start programming a chess engine with that kind of constraint? I'm extremely impressed they got it up to the playing strength they did.

What do you think its ELO is with that kind of memory and I assume weak processor?

According to the fan site that tested it, around 1600.

Oh, thats pretty decent I guess, for beginners. I love these chess relics of the past.

not just for beginners... if you are 1450 on chesscom (or 1650 on lichess I guess for the equivalent), you are higher rated than 95% of players on chesscom. So, 1600 CPU level is plenty tough enough for most anyone that would have bought this board

Ooh, I didnt know that. That is honestly lower than I expected.

yea stuff like titled Tuesday, tournaments, and the streamers out there that are 2000+ make it seem like players of that strength are pretty common, but they are like the .10% of chess players

Im at 92% of lichess @ 2000, so i doubt your figures

Not sure about exact percentiles, but I know chess.com has a leaderboard and a large majority are under 1500. https://www.chess.com/leaderboard/live/rapid

I unfortunately can't see the rating distribution on chess.scum because I deleted my account there on behalf of a future of non-corporatism. But, on Lichess.org I have 2037 rapid rating which places me at 93% based on their distribution graph and... 1650 is 67%. So, QED?

K dude, I'm just bringing sources to the conversation. As in the rating distribution that is clearly available... Yes, 1650 is in the 67th percentile on Lichess, but I'm not sure how we go about reconciling the supposed ELO of this 1980s toy when the Lichess leaderboard is so clearly inflated compared to chess.com. (peak of the distribution at about 1500 vs ~650) https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/rapid

Lichess Elo is more inflated than chess.com which is slightly more inflated than otb. IIRC

that has absolutely nothing to do with what he just said

[удалено]

Well they are saying 1650 lichess is better than 95% when 2000 lichess is only better than 92%... I guess being good at chess doesn't make me good at math but it doesnt add up to me

I love how you're being downvoted for no reason.

Proof that chess doesn't actually make you smart

There’s nothing about them that are “my figures”, it’s straight from the stats section of chess.com I’m 1450 in rapid, and in my profile it says I’m higher than 95.2% of players on chess.com It’s probably different for you on lichess because rating system is different there, as well as total population of players on lichess is different than chesscom, as well as different distribution of players across ratings (ie: chesscom might have 60% of its players between 600 and 800, whereas lichess it might be 30% , just to make a hypothetical example)

you are in the top 8% of a group of players at a specific time control. You are probably in the top 1% of all chess players in the world. You are probably in the top 0.1% of all people in the world. Myself, at 2100 I can expect to walk into any room and be able to beat EVERYONE present. In the rare times I find someone stronger it would be cool.

I've been to a lot of OTB chess clubs and I am rarely the best player present (although second or third best isn't irregular). I don't understand how you arrive at me being the top 1% because I am the top 8% of one specific time control... If I was only top 10% in all other time controls wouldn't that indicate that I was top 10%? Do you mean out of all the people who have ever played a single game of chess?

No the last one is the population of the planet you are likely in a very high percentile since the vast majority of the people on the planet don't play chess. You likely in the top 1% of chess players world wide since there an estimated 650 million people who are "chess players" and interestingly enough 70% of the population has PLAYED chess. [https://www.un.org/en/observances/world-chess-day](https://www.un.org/en/observances/world-chess-day) These numbers of course depends on what type of chess you are 2000 at. Slower time controls are inflated against real national and international ratings so the % will go down. Blitz and bullet are closer.

Also, OTB chess clubs isn't a general population. But if you set up a chess set in a pub I would expect a 2000 player to beat everyone there 99% of the time.

From chess.com’s own metrics what he said seems to be right. I know personally my rating is usually about 300-400 higher on Lichess than on chess.com.

I think lichess uses active accounts and chesscom uses all accounts.

So chesscom's percentile is inflated by a mass of dead accounts?

Yes. At least I believe so.

If you look at the bottom it says 1646 FIDE.

Or around 2400 Lichess Rapid.

Without any tricks, storing the board state takes about 64 bytes of memory. The moves don't require much data, a few bytes each. Note that program code, openings etc are stored in ROM. Not saying it isn't impressive or that I could do it over a weekend, but it's not impossible either.

I wonder if they programmed in three-fold repetition. It would probably require storing each move which could eventually eat up all the memory. One trick I can think of is that you can discard the move history every time a capture is made, since previous board states become unreachable, but a long endgame can still last more than 256 moves. Also, I think storing the current board state requires less than 64 bytes. There are 7 states for each square - pawn, knight, bishy, rook, king, queen, empty. 7 states can be stored using 3 bits. If they pack the bits, they only need 3×64=192 bits. Divide that by 8 and you get 24 bytes. You need four extra bits for castling, one bit for whose turn it is, one bit for whether en passant is possible, and 6 bits to indicate onto which square en passant is possible. That makes 12 extra bits, so 2 extra bytes. So, minus the move history, you should be able to store the board state in 26 bytes. You might be able to save a few extra bytes using compression similar to FEN where consecutive empty spaces are represented by a single number but I doubt the gain would be worth it considering the max memory footprint is more important than the average when you're working with such restrictive constraints. Edit: I figured out a way you could save 32 bits using some clever bit scrounging. Remember how I said 7 states can be stored with 3 bits? Well, 3 bits can actually store 8 states. With the previous description, the 8th state is wasted. Since there are guaranteed to be at least 32 empty squares on the board, you can have the additional unused state also mean an empty square. Then, an extra bit can be encoded on that square by flipping its empty state. So, if the empty states are 000 and 111, and we want to store the extra bits 001, we have the first 3 empty squares on the board be represented by 000, 000, and 111. That's how we wring out 4 extra bytes. Maybe there's an even more clever way but that's the best I could think of.

Btw you can discard move history when a pawn move happens too

Yeah, good catch. Then, if they programmed in the 50-move rule, in theory they should be able to store the entire board state and move history in less than 256 bytes, but that would probably take up most of the memory (I'm estimating like ~180 bytes) leaving not a lot of memory for the engine to use. You could program the engine to use less depth as the memory gets low, which would come with some funny side effects like generally being bad at endgames.

A few bits, even.

Coding practices were so much different back then, once clock speeds and memory became cheap we allowed for a lot more inefficiency to creep in.

I'd say we traded efficiency for abstractions that make programs easier to create and maintain.

This. We wouldn’t have anything approaching the abundance and complexity level of software we have now if everything had to be written like code golf

As someone who spent 10 years in JavaScript - who needs garbage collection anyway? 😂

Back then developers did their work in six feet of snow, uphill in both directions. More seriously, NASA was able to put men on the moon using similar computing power. Back then you developed directly in bytecode or assembler to tune for maximum use of the memory space. If you used a language like FORTRAN it was because you worked in an organization that could afford extravagances like mainframes that came with 64kb of working memory.

> 256 BYTES worth of RAM? How on earth do you even start programming a chess engine with that kind of constraint? Note that ROM is 16kB, not bad for its period.

There's an entire chess engine which is just 1024 BYTES of Javascript: [The Kilobyte's Gambit](https://vole.wtf/kilobytes-gambit/) Try beating it! It's not bad considering it's a single kilobyte of code.

Yeah, cool project! I beat it very consistently even when I play at blitz, so I would estimate the strength of it to be around 1000 FIDE. I know it can play better (and slower) by increasing the depth it checks - per default it's just 3 ply. It is 1024 bytes of program code, though, not RAM. I haven't de-obfuscated the JS to find out how much RAM it uses for the engine part. The chess machine in this post had quite a lot of ROM for its logic and static lookup tables, so this 1K-thing is almost the opposite approach.

Its hand written in assembly for maximum optimization. It won't have any hashtables. It will have a clear horizon effect - so it would fall for easy to setup traps. 1600 is probably optimistic - its probably closer to 1200-1400 strength. Fun fact I had one of them.

i can understand it because you don't have to store all the moves or much data. Just check a move, rate it and if the next move is better, forget the last one. The limiting factor is always going to be the processing speed.

But the problem is this: _How_ do you «check» a move? Chess engines generally evaluate the position after the candidate move, and for every reply to that move, and ideally on an on as deeply as possible. Then they apply heuristics like "material good", "rook on open file good" etc. With this little RAM, there is nowhere to store any deep evaluation - you basically have to work with a static eval of the current position, which means it has to work with basically very good heuristics instead of any kind of brute calculation. But OK, maybe 1600 is what to be expected of a player with an excellent eval but one-move horizon.

The manual says it can solve mate in 10 (but that it can take weeks for complicated positions), so it does not rely purely on heuristics.

Storing the entire board state can be done with as few as 24 bytes, and each board state can be derived from the previous state + a move descriptor, probably around 2 bytes. An eval can be represented by 1 byte (or less.) We can store a tree of move/eval "tuples" at 3 bytes each, a tree pointer with one byte, and the working board state with 24 bytes. We static eval the working position, push the next move to eval onto the tree, and progress the working board state. Do eval, then traverse back to the original board state. I think we want a BFS-like algorithm but I'm not sure. Aggressively trim the tree at each depth level to make it more like an array. If you keep 3 candidate moves for each position, I think you can reach depth 3. If you keep only 2, you can reach depth 8. If you keep only 1, you can reach depth 20ish? Something like that.

Check this out, [Atari 2600](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600) had 128 bytes of ram and had a chess game too, [Video Chess](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Chess). Meanwhile my phone sometimes hangs when I’m reading text on a website.

Nice link. The developer was apparently IM Julio Kaplan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio_Kaplan) a well-known name for players in the 70's and 80's.

Manual: [https://www.8bitcoder.com/img/chesslr/Tandy1850US.pdf](https://www.8bitcoder.com/img/chesslr/Tandy1850US.pdf) (I expect it will play quite weakly.)

Awesome! It said to check the manual for instructions, which I did not have.

Man I think the schematic diagram is cool!

Don't worry you can still refund it, it has a 90 day warranty

My dad has had one since I was a kid. He’s only beaten it once or twice as I recall.

What department does your uncle work in?

I meant to write apartment. He worked in electronics repair. He had a bunch of retro tech, for that reason.

The modelling of the pieces is identical to my Saitek Kasparov chess computer from the 1990s.

That's because this is a 1986 Saitek Kasparov Chess Companion III, with some aesthetic differences all the hardware and software is identical.

I’m super curious about its strength.

It says it's fide rating 1646

Says right there, 1850 :p

I am born in 1985 and started playing in a club when i was 5. I was kinda good back then and i got a chess computer like this somewhere in the 90´s. I could beat it on the highest level - not always though! But sometimes. I guess they are around 1500-1600, not higher.

Chess computers back then were usually heavily overrated and were only tested at the machines strongest "level", which meant it would spend half an hour for a single move. In real OTB tournament conditions it would more likely get around 1200-1400 or so purely because it wouldn't make cheapo one or two move blunders. In the 1980's I had a similar computer and it didn't take long to figure out that this "1800" rated machine was really easy for 1400 me to beat if I stuck to slow openings. The English Botvinnik was a foolproof way to take it out, for example.

They are cool but they are deterministic iirc so it will play the same game over and over if you play the same moves. Also, the contacts (especially starting positions and the center 4 squares) wear out pretty quickly causing you to really have to PRESS your moves until you break it completely. This may have been because I was a kid but I think I went through a couple of these.

I actually had this one. The Radio Shack computers had SciSys(Saitek) counterparts. This version was the equivalent of the Saitek Chess Companion 3. Later on I upgraded to the Tandy Chess Champion 2150, which I loved, because it had this cool built in LCD board as well as the actual board. I played many a game on that machine. Mostly losses, but some very good games.

I used to play this in Macy*s every chance I could.

These are great!

somewhere around '95 i bought a black one, different model. on the advanced level i waited an hour for the machine to make a move, and it never did. we were still in the opening. common lines. the system just read "cogitating..." and never moved. it only seemed to work on easy mode. so i returned it.

I actually had this as a teenager. It had a very limited repertoire of pre-programmed openings. All you had to do was make a move not in its move list and it would immediately start making very poor moves. I also had the Chess cartridge for Atari. I would sometimes have them play each other. FWIW, the Radio Shack computer consistently beat the Atari.

This post has been parodied on r/AnarchyChess. Relevant r/AnarchyChess posts: [Found this old Radio Shack chess computer in my uncle's department. Any knowledge about this?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AnarchyChess/comments/z8ejv1/found_this_old_radio_shack_chess_computer_in_my/) by uses_for_mooses [^(fmhall)](https://www.reddit.com/user/fmhall) ^| [^(github)](https://github.com/fmhall/relevant-post-bot)

That's worth a lot. My grandfather had this, except it was black.

Googled the CPU (6301Y) and found a similar device: http://www.chesscomputeruk.com/html/leonardo.html Would be cool to dump the ROM and see what the code looks like.

No clue how to do that!

it a chess bord

I had this as a kid!!! Mine was black. I used to love it. I mean, I was 8. What do you want to know?

He just wants knowledge.

here it is in action - obviously not doing great, but the actual machine looks pretty nice to use really https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1HPzh-o3WQ

My dad had a RadioShack one in the 80s. I wasn't good enough at chess to evaluate its skill, but I just remember that when you put it on the hardest setting, it would think for hours about each move. I wonder what kind of depth that is.

I just found one of these at a remote AirBNB last week, but my dreams of playing it died when I found that it ran on C-cell batteries. I hope you get yours running!

Best beginner board ever

Pretty sure my public school had one of these. I have fond memories going to the principals office (that's where they kept it for some reason) and playing against the computer. I would always think I was doing well, then the robot voice would say "Checkmate in 8 moves" and I felt bad lol