Саргон: История шахматной программы для персональных компьютеров

Video game series

Sargon (or SARGON) is a line of chess playing software for personal computers. The original SARGON from 1978 was written in assembly language by Dan and Kathleen "Kathe" Spracklen for the Z80 based Wavemate Jupiter II.

SARGON was introduced at the 1978 West Coast Computer Faire where it won the first computer chess tournament held strictly for microcomputers, with a score of 5–0. This success encouraged the authors to seek financial income by selling the program directly to customers. Since magnetic media were not widely available at the time, the authors placed an advert in Byte magazine selling for $15 photocopied listings that would work in any Z80 based microcomputer. Later the Spracklens were contacted by Hayden Books and a book was published.

When magnetic media publishing became widely available, a US Navy petty officer, Paul Lohnes, ported Sargon to the TRS 80, altering the graphics, input, and housekeeping routines but leaving the Spracklens' chess playing algorithm intact. Paul consulted with the Spracklens, who were both living in San Diego at the time, to make the TRS 80 version an instant success with the help of Hayden Book's newly established software division: Hayden Software. Paul was not involved in further refinements to the TRS 80 version due to his reassignment to sea duty shortly after signing the deal with Hayden Software. In the early 1980s, SARGON CHESS was ported to the Nascom (by Bits & PCs, 1981), Exidy Sorcerer, and Sharp MZ 80K. A complete rewrite was necessary later for the Apple II, programmed by Kathleen's brother Gary Shannon. Both were published by Hayden Software.

The Spracklens made significant improvements on the original program and released Sargon II. He often beat the program at level 3—when it considered moves for about two minutes—and stated that "Level 0 is an idiot but responds instantly". It received a 1641 rating at the Paul Masson tournament in June–July 1979, and 1736 at the San Jose City College Open in January 1980. Sargon 3.0 finished in seventh place at the October 1979 North American Computer Chess Championship. The competition had improved, but 3.0 drew against Cray Blitz and easily defeated Mychess, its main microcomputer rival. In December, 3.0 easily won the second microcomputer championship in London. Sargon III was a complete rewrite. Instead of an exchange evaluator, this version used a capture search algorithm. Also included was a chess opening repertoire. This third version was written originally for the 6502 assembler. In 1978, Sargon was converted to Z80 neumonics/assembler code by Paul H. Lohnes, as self taught computer enthusiast while he was still in the US Navy. He sold the publishing rights to Hayden Software for the Radio Shack TRS 80 platform. It was commercially published for other computing platforms by Hayden Software in 1983. Apple contacted the Spracklens and, after a port for 68000 assembly, Sargon III was the first third party executable software for the Macintosh. A compilation titled 4 in 1 Fun Pak was released for the Game Boy in 1992. One of the games in the compilation is Sargon Chess. The Spracklens concurrently wrote the engines for the dedicated chess computers produced by Fidelity Electronics, which won the first four World Microcomputer Chess Championships.