Talk:HiTech

Capitalization
Berliner himself did not capitalize the "t":

The only source that our article is currently citing, a New York Times article by Schonberg, is behind a paywall. Does Schonberg capitalize the "t"? If not, I think we should stop capitalizing the "t". Bruce leverett (talk) 03:49, 19 April 2022 (UTC)


 * At denkerchess.com, I found a copy of Schonberg and another article (by Bisguier) about Denker's match with Hitech. Schonberg definitely capitalizes the "T", and Bisguier sometimes does.  So I will leave things alone. Bruce leverett (talk) 04:19, 19 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I think you were right originally. Computer Chess Compendium, Levy (1988), pp. 401–406 uses "Hitech" when in the crosstable and game scores for the Fifth World Computer Chess Championship, Köln, West Germany, June 11–15, 1986.  Unfortunately I don't think the book says anything in particular about Hitech, but the crosstable for the 5th WCCC indicates Hitech had a rating of 2270 and won games against BCP (England), Schach 2.7 (West Germany), Plymate (Sweden), Rebel (Netherlands) and lost in the last round to Cray Blitz. The book is a collection of papers on computer chess and the combined bibliography at the end lists 15 works by Berliner, mostly short notes in SIGART from 1969 through 1976.  Of possibly greater interest is Berliner (1978), Computer Chess, Nature, vol. 274, 24 Aug 1978, pp 745-748.  I don't have a source for this, but it seems plausible that Hitech got its name from the earlier CMU chess playing program, TECH.
 * Berliner worked on an earlier program, PATSOC (Plays A Terrible Sort Of Chess). I have some information on that program from Computer Chess II, Welsh and Baczynskyj (1985).  PATSOC 2.0 finished 14th in the 4th WCCC, New York 1983.  It ran on a DEC KL10 (1.2 MIPS) and evaluated 165 positions per second.  You might be interested to know that it was written in BLISS, a language invented at CMU that was important in early work on optimizing compilers.  Quale (talk) 06:48, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Sometimes, when reliable sources give two different spellings of a name, we can use redirects so that people can easily find the thing with either spelling. But in this case, there is existing ambiguity which will make things more complicated, as one can see from Hitech.  Even though I am inclined to favor the lower case "t", a fair amount of work would be involved in modifying the status quo.
 * Indeed, I worked on a BLISS compiler (but not the one for the PDP-10) while I was at CMU. Bruce leverett (talk) 18:08, 20 April 2022 (UTC)