Another Blast from the Past... Cray Blitz

[Dirk]

Another Blast from the Past

People who Know me by now a little bit better know that I like playing against old historic chess programs (like Sargon, Turing, Bernstein and all our cool retro mame machines). That’s why I got hooked immediately when I read about this topic in the talkchess forum.

Have you ever wanted to play against a supercomputer with one of the best mainframe chess programs of the 80s in PicoChess?

Cray Blitz was the successor of the program Blitz (and influenced by Chess 4.9 etc.)  by Robert Hyatt and Albert Gower. 

From the readme document:

"With the sponsorship of Cray Research, supported by Dave Darling and Derek Robb, and later by Cray Assembly expert Harry Nelson from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, they adopted and optimized Blitz for a Cray-1 supercomputer.

Cray Blitz was written in Fortran, time-critical parts in the Cray Assembly Language CAL.

Cray Blitz won two times the ACM North American Computer Chess Championships and also was two times winner of the World Computer Chess Championships, the WCCC 1983 in New York , and the WCCC 1986 in Cologne."

Such as impressive the hardware and software were at that time so complex is it to get it working within PicoChess - but I finally got it!

More information about this „project“ and the windows executables you will find in this thread on talkchess.com:

https://talkchess.com/viewtopic.php?t=83496

Big thanks to Jim Ablett for compiling the old FORTAN code and all the people (eg. Alex) who have written scripts to make the WB and UCI interfaces possible (the original program is an „old school“ text base interactive chess program where you answer some question (like color to play etc.) and enter the moves one by one.

Unfortunately the windows UCI version of Cray Blitz which can be downloaded from the thread does not work in Picochess. So I had to configure a working version based on the original compiled cray engine (written in FORTRAN etc.) and a WB-converter based on InBetween and a UCI wrapper based on WB2UCI by myself for Picochess. 

So we have 3(!) windows executables calling each user and running under box86/wine64 - quite impressive that wine can handle this.

There are some important restrictions in order to make this work:

1. There are two different scripts/PicoChess engines newcessary: one for white and one for black (but that s is not a big deal)
2. Like for our retro mame chess engines you can’t take back moves or use an external book (cray blitz has an own internal one )
3. You can’t simple start a new game by putting the pieces back in starting position - you MUST restart the engine again: simply select the engine in engines menu again which should be quite easy as it is the default option when you press the „ >> confirm button“  multiple times ;-)
4. In order to change the thinking time for Cray Blitz we have to update a script unfortunately. At the moment it is set to 5 second and the emulation is almost that fast on a pi4…

When you don’t follow restrictions 2 and 3 then the engine could get stuck and you have to restart PicoChess.

Otherwise I could now play multiple games without any strange abortion (which still might occur).

Regarding the playing strength: I have updated my engines.ini or favorites.ini with elo level 2150 according to the following estimation graph but don’t know how it compares to our PI4 wine/box emulation…

https://intelligence.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Muehlhauser-Historical-chess-engines-estimated-ELO-ratings.pdf

(This Cray Blitz version is 49h from 1990)

I don’t know if this will make it into Randy’s wine image but we will see. 

Dirk

 - who lost against a mainframe supercomputer chess program several times ;-);-);-)

[Dirk]

I have added the successor of to my systems: the very well known CRAFTY engine ;-)

CrayBlitz 

Crafty is a "real" WB engine so we need the WB2UCI converter as well.

Unfortunately I couldn't find a CRAFTY version that supports the ELO restriction option although there should be some compilation across the internet that should support it - but I had no luck. If we could find one version with that feature we could use PicoChess Auto-Elo adoption feature...

Dirk