Sargon

My dad's chess program was called Sargon, which was also the name of a famous one, and when I was about twenty-five and had learned enough to know that, I asked him if he'd named it after the famous one and he said, "No, love, after the king," and went back to his crossword. It ran on a ZX Spectrum. He wrote it in Z80 assembly over the winter of 1983, on a kitchen table in Stockport, while my mum was pregnant with my brother. It searched three moves ahead. It had an opening book of about a dozen lines that he'd typed in from a library book. It played, by his own admission, like a nervous club player who'd had two pints. I didn't understand any of this when I was small. I understood that there was a tape, and if you loaded the tape and waited through the screeching, a chessboard came up in eight colours and you could play against Dad's Thing. Dad's Thing beat me every time until I was twelve. Then I beat it and I was so pleased and he was so quietly, obviously pleased that I've spent some time since wondering whether it let me. It couldn't have. It was three-ply minimax with a hand-written evaluation function. It didn't know who I was. It didn't know anything. That's the part I've been sitting with. I'm a research engineer now. I work on models that would have been science fiction to the man at that kitchen table. They have more parameters than he had bytes, by a factor I can't make sound sensible. They write code. They write poems. They pass, most of the time, for someone who understands you. And I don't think he understands what I do, and I know I've never really tried to explain, because the honest explanation involves saying: Dad, the thing you did, where you sat down and reasoned out what a good position looks like and wrote it as numbers, where you understood every single instruction the machine executed, we don't do that anymore. We stopped doing that. We show it ten trillion words and let it figure out what a good position looks like on its own and then we spend our careers trying to work out what it figured out.

I think he'd find that a bit sad. I think he'd be a bit right. Last Christmas I brought a Spectrum emulator on my laptop and a copy of the tape image I'd found on an archive site, because somebody, some stranger, had preserved it. Dad's Thing. Sargon. He didn't know it was out there. He played it. Seventy-one years old, squinting at my screen, and it opened with the Ruy Lopez because that's the first line he'd typed in from the library book in 1983, and he said, "Oh, there you are," to it, very softly. He beat it in thirty moves. It was never very good. He knew exactly why it made every mistake it made, and he told me, and I understood about half of it. Then he said, "Show me one of yours, then," and I opened a terminal and asked a model to play the Ruy Lopez against him, and it did, and it was much better than Sargon, and it beat him, and he sat back and said, "Well. Why did it play that on move nineteen?" And I said, "I don't know." He looked at me for a while. Then he said, "Hm," and went to put the kettle on. We haven't talked about it since. I keep thinking we will.