* * * * *
                                        
              The fight for the smallest chess program is intense
                                        
> Why would someone someone obsess over writing the world’s smallest chess
> program? Poudade has a complicated answer, involving paying his respects to
> a long-ago programming genius, drawing attention to his own coding group,
> and proving a thing or two to young-whippersnapper coders. That’s what
> motivated him to devote hundreds of hours to code what is ultimately a tiny
> black-and-white grid of text and numbers. Poudade’s chasing something like
> the Platonic ideal of computer chess programs.
> 
> He did something that mattered; he had the record. But, as they say,
> records are made to be broken.
> 

Via Reddit [1], “The bitter rivalry behind the world’s smallest chess program
[2]”

Poudade's chess game is only 487 bytes in size [3], yet it's not the shortest
chess program anymore, having an extraneous six bytes! And Poudade is not
happy about that.

I didn't know the world of smallest chess programs was so cutthroat.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/coding/comments/3lon3q/the_bitter_rivalry_behi
[2] http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/14353/small
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2015/02/02.1

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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