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BootChess: The Tiniest Chess Program in Town

Coding hyper-efficient chess programs has been something like a running contest among big time Smarty Pantses with too much time on their hands. For the last 33 years, the record for the smallest version of chess was held by the fabled 1K ZX Chess for the Sinclair ZX81. First published in 1982, 1K ZX had all of the basic chess rules and a opponent loaded into a now-hard-to-imagine 672 bytes of memory. Its publisher, David Horne , would go on to publish the code for the program in a three art Computer Magazine series (the first part of which you can see embedded below: This is the super-rad David Horne: 1K ZX's 33 year reign has just been challenged. The challenger is a program called BootChess, which includes all of the features of 1K ZX with a stunning memory allocation of only 512 bytes. The program was written by  Olivier Poudade and Peter Ferrie . It was never a very graphic-intensive game, anyway This is a photo of Peter Ferrie: A photo of Olivier Po

Chess, Encryption and Comic Books (Mind MGMT)

Lately, I've been hooked on a brilliant comic book from genius Matt Kindt , called Mind MGMT . In a nutshell, Mind MGMT follows a cold war era intelligence service based on the conceit that Men Who Stare at Goats -style ESP spook tactics work, and have silently and secretly played a role in the machinations of world politics throughout the 20th century. Mind MGMT is really clever, the art is striking and the whole business is worth a read on its own. Part of the fun of the comic book is that the creators seamlessly weave the sort of subliminal messaging they use in the plot, into the layout of the comic itself. Fake advertisements in the back of issues contain hidden text, while the margins themselves are formatted like Scantron documents with little limericks where the dotted "fold here" lines usually go. Just today I read through issue 23, which opens with a tale of a man gifted with the fore-mentioned spying super-powers; a reclusive Bobby Fischer type who commun