Oh no - not another blast from the past ;-)
Dirk
I have added Awit/Wita to my historical PicoChess engines (excerpt form chessprogramming wiki https://www.chessprogramming.org/Awit):
Awit
"a chess program written by Tony Marsland. The original program, which played in the first ACM 1970 in New York was called Wita. The name was derived from Witan, which was for a meeting of wise men. The inspiration for Wita came from the 1966 Fall Joint Computer Conference [2] in San Francisco and had been impressed by Richard Greenblatt's talk about Mac Hack.
In about 1977, the name was changed to Awit for two reasons. First, to put the program nearer the top of an alphabetical list and second (more importantly) to reflect the program's propensity to play subtle moves that were rife with fatal flaws. Awit-Wita was written in Algol W [3] and ran on IBM 370 under the Michigan Terminal System (MTS) [4] . Awit is an selective Shannon type B searcher with a lot of chess knowledge implemented, and therefor with 8 Nodes per second [5] extremely slow with an impressive strength / nodes-evaluated ratio, despite its inherent tactical flaws up and then."
Awit uses an extremely selective Shannon type B algorithm in order to overcome the brute force computing power restrictions at that time (1970) and to play more like a real human (other programs of these types are eg. Mephisto 3/Glasgow, or the old Bernstein program).
I got the information/fiels out of this talkchess forum thread:
https://talkchess.com/viewtopic.php?t=39601
and this schachcomputer.ifo thread:
https://www.schachcomputer.info/forum/showthread.php?t=7106
The awit.exe runs under windows (so we have to use wine/box in PicoChess) and it behaves (almost) like a real WB engine thanks to the WB config file Alex has created:
We can play with white/black, switch sides, start new games but we can’t take back moves unfortunately (although it first looks like it does work built later an error will occur - at least in my tries).
I just added the WB2UCI converter in order to support the uci protocol for PicoChess.
Maybe Randy will add this engine to his wine image as well…
Enjoy!
Dirk
