ChessPositionRanking VS FUZIX

3. There's extra nuanced things you might want to handle in the coding, like that pawns can't be on their own back row. That is significantly harder.

It looks to me like https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking has resolved these sorts of issues, but I haven't dug into exactly how.

Multinomial rankings can be combined with a dozen others to rank a subset of all chess positions including all legal ones. This allows one to sample millions of random such positions, determine how many are legal, and thus obtain an accurate estimate of 4.8&10^44 legal chess positions [2].

[1] https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking/blob/main/src/...

[2] https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking

The key words being "without promotion". Both bounds, this one and Steinerberger's, only consider positions reachable without promotion. Allowing promotions, one estimate suggests that the number is close to 4.82 × 10^44.

source

This one as well as Shannon number wiki seem to say that possible sensible moves are about 10^40 while and 10^120 while taking any moves (maybe including some illogical / illegal ones) .

Shannon's estimate was based on very primitive methods; by generating random positions and using fairly advanced methods to see whether they are legal or not (ie., can you construct a proof game for it, or prove that it could never happen), you will get much closer. A group of people have been working on this, and their current best estimate is (4.822 +- 0.028) * 10^44, or a bit over 148 bits. (Amazingly enough, Shannon wasn't all that far off on this account! His estimated number of legal games seems much more dodgy, though.)

http://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=77685&sid=e3...

Practically speaking, https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking gives a number between 0 and approx. 8.7 * 10^45 for any legal position, so it's only a couple of bits away from optimality.

The number of chess positions has now been estimated with 2 digits of accuracy as ~ 4.8 x 10^44: https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking

Alan Cox has a "Fuzix" repo, that puts together Uzix variants for the Z80.

https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX

Fuzix does appear to have CPU support for 6800 and is probably your best starting location. Although based on what I've seen of the ET-3400 you could be in for quite the uphill struggle.

Software complexity also helps to establish or maintain the predominance of large corporations on the market. In contrast, a simple software system can be reimplemented by a small team or even a single person, so there is more competition. This is not only demonstrated by Wirth's systems, but also by several 7th edition Unix clones of the 80's [1-4] as well as current ones [5] and also reimplementations of the classic MacOS [6].

Back in the 1980s, operating systems and compilers were often seen as the most complex pieces of software. Nowadays, web browsers include (and reimplement) large parts of an OS and compiler and are probably even more complex than a current OS such as Linux or a current compiler such as clang/LLVM. Only rich (or well funded) companies such as Google, Apple and the Mozilla foundation can afford to build a browser today that can be used to access current web pages.

So a central question is if we can turn back times and make software more simple again. Maybe this ship has already sailed - but it can't hurt to try. From experience with my students, it is extremely satisfying for them to build a complete system from scratch instead of mostly copying and pasting library calls or StackOverflow code snippets. Thus, I try to enable my students to experience this sense of achievement. They will probably never get the chance to do something similar in their later career in industry.

[1] One Man Unix for 68k - http://www.pix.net/mirrored/discordia.org.uk/~steve/omu.html

[2] Uzix for Z80 (link to the MSX port) - http://uzix.sourceforge.net

[3] Coherent Unix - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)

[4] Minix - https://www.minix3.org

[5] Alan Cox' Fuzix - https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX

[6] Ardi Executor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_(software)

How about FUZIX? It might be a better fit for vintage computers?

https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX

Also fuzix: https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX