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                    The smallest chess program ever written
                                        
Thirty-two years ago, David Horne wrote a chess program [1] for the ZX-81
[2]. It didn't play a great game of chess, and you can't castle, capture en
passant nor promote a pawn, but it did have one redeeming feature that set it
above every other chess program—it took less than 1K (kilobyte) of space [3]!
The program, in its entirety, is only 672 bytes in size.

But there's a new contender for the smallest chess game (and the same
limitations—no castling, no en passant, no promotion) with BootChess [4],
which is an incredible 487 bytes in size [5]!

[1] http://archive.org/stream/your-computer-magazine-1983-02/YourComputer_1983_02#page/n99/mode/2up
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K_ZX_Chess
[4] http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=64962
[5] http://olivier.poudade.free.fr/src/BootChess.asm

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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