Chess Computer Program Weighs In At Just 487 Bytes

Certainly this French coder would most probably still think that 640k is enough for everyone – especially when you see that his chess computer program is stored on jst 487 bytes of code. That is certainly an insanely small amount of memory no matter how you look at it, and even more so in this day and age where a game would take up a few gigabytes’ worth of data. Known as BootChess, the 487 bytes’ worth of source code is so magical, it can run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux computers to boot.

Just to see the magnitude of things in the long run, BootChess happens to be smaller than 1K ZX Chess, where the latter is a Sinclair ZX81 computer game that carried just 672 bytes of code. The thing is, 1K ZX Chess has been the record holder for the better part of 33 years, and now that BootChess has arrived, it just goes to show how far things have progressed. Olivier Poudade has hopes that his achievement will be able to be an inspiration to different programmers out there to be more involved in the “sizecoding” scene.

Poudade mentioned, “[It] demonstrates why assembly language is still the language of choice to excel [at] in programming.”

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers, Gaming
Tags: chess