The first computer chess I played was Sargon II on a Commodore VIC-20. This game came out in 1982 on a 8 KB ROM cartridge and ran in the VIC-20's 5K of RAM. I still have it. I got to wondering how its strength compared to modern programs. Ok, obviously full strength Stockfish would crush it. But how would it do against the different levels of Stockfish here on Lichess?
Sargon has 7 difficulty levels numbered 0 through 6. But it is slow. Really slow. So I cheated a bit and ran it on an emulator set to 10x speed. It is still the same program with the same limitations, just moves 10 times as fast so I don't have to wait around forever.
So far Sargon is undefeated. Here it is set to level 1, beating Lichess level 5:
Sargon has 7 difficulty levels numbered 0 through 6. But it is slow. Really slow. So I cheated a bit and ran it on an emulator set to 10x speed. It is still the same program with the same limitations, just moves 10 times as fast so I don't have to wait around forever.
So far Sargon is undefeated. Here it is set to level 1, beating Lichess level 5: