CCCP (US)

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CCCP, the Columbia Computer Chess Program developed by a group of students at Columbia University, Steven M. Bellovin, Aron Eisenpress, Andrew Koenig, and Ben Yalow, written in PL/I. CCCP played the ACM 1971, where it ran on IBM 360/91 at Columbia University. The project already started during the ACM 1970 in collaboration with Hans Berliner from Carnegie Mellon University, when J. Biit was operated through a chess GUI written at Columbia for the IBM 2250 Display Unit. The four students continued to develop J. Biit, replacing the back end with a much better set of algorithms, evolving into CCCP (a pun on the Cyrillic abbreviation for the official name of the Soviet Union, Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик) after one year of effort.

=Team Effort= Andrew Koenig on the individual roles of the programming team I designed the overall structure of the program and coded much of the human interface. Steve wrote the tree searching and pruning routines, Ben did the move generation and evaluation routines, and Aron wrote the part of the human interface that made it possible to enter moves at a 2250 display with a light pen ...

=Selected Games= ACM 1971, round 3, CCCP - David [Event "ACM 1971"] [Site "Chicago USA"] [Date "1971.08.04"] [Round "3"] [White "CCCP"] [Black "David"] [Result "1/2-1/2"]

1.e4 e6 2.d4 Nc6 3.Nc3 g5 4.Bb5 a6 5.Bxc6 dxc6 6.Be3 b5 7.Qh5 b4 8.Bxg5 Nf6 9.Bxf6 Qxf6 10.e5 Qg7 11.Ne4 Qxg2 12.Qf3 Qxf3 13.Nxf3 Bh6 14.Nf6+ Ke7 15.a3 bxa3 16.Rxa3 Rb8 17.O-O Rxb2 18.c4 a5 19.Rxa5 Rb3 20.Kg2 Rxf3 21.Kxf3 Bd2 22.Rc5 Bc3 23.Rxc6 Bb7 24.Nd5+ exd5 25.Rxc7+ Ke6 26.Rxb7 dxc4 27.Rb6+ Kf5 28.Rf6+ Kg5 29.Rg1+ Kh5 30.Rf5+ Kh6 31.Rf6+ Kh5 32.Rf5+ Kh6 33.Rf6+ Kh5 34.Rf5+ 1/2-1/2 =The Computer Was a Fish=

In his essay The Computer Was a Fish, published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, August 1972, George R. R. Martin mentions the ACM 1971 and a computer chess program called CCCP, which had a certain Mr. Benjamin Yalow on the team. The essay inspired Charles F. and Charlie Wilkes to write their program The Fox.

=Namesake=
 * CCCP by Pawel Koziol

=Publications=
 * Andrew Koenig (1978). Light-Pen used in game. Personal Computing, Vol. 2, No. 5, pp. 112

=External Links=
 * Computing at Columbia Timeline
 * Recollections of CUCC 1968-70 -The CCCP Chess Program
 * СССР - Wiktionary
 * CCCP (disambiguation) from Wikipedia

=References=

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