Why would someone someone obsess over writing the world’s smallest chess program? Poudade has a complicated answer, involving paying his respects to a long-ago programming genius, drawing attention to his own coding group, and proving a thing or two to young-whippersnapper coders. That’s what motivated him to devote hundreds of hours to code what is ultimately a tiny black-and-white grid of text and numbers. Poudade’s chasing something like the Platonic ideal of computer chess programs.
He did something that mattered; he had the record. But, as they say, records are made to be broken.
Via Reddit [1], “The bitter rivalry behind the world’s smallest chess program [2]”
Poudade's chess game is only 487 bytes in size [3], yet it's not the shortest chess program anymore, having an extraneous six bytes! And Poudade is not happy about that.
I didn't know the world of smallest chess programs was so cutthroat.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/coding/comments/3lon3q/the_bitter_rivalry_behi
[2] http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/14353/small