SWISS GAME DESIGN ARCHIVE 1968-2000

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GAME

1980
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1st
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Unspecified 8085 system
Chess

Viktor

Viktor is a chess program written in 8080 Assembly for microcomputers, named after Viktor Korchnoi, a Soviet (before 1976) and Swiss (after 1980) chess grandmaster. "Viktor" was developed by a private german research institute for android technology (PFIAT Privates Forschungsinstitut für Androidentechnik), and was examined by Herbert Bruderer on behalf of Siemens-Nixdorf.

Viktor participated at the First World Microcomputer Chess Championship 1980 in London, where it scored two points out of five rounds, running on an unspecified 8085 system with 8 KiB of Memory. (Source: Chess Programming Wiki, https://www.chessprogramming.org/Viktor) It lost to the later champion "Chess Challenger". With two wins and three losses of five played rounds, it ranked 10th of an overall 14 competitors.

Herbert Bruderer, a retired lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich and a historian of technology, further recounts in 2024 in Communications of the ACM: "At that time, there was a gold rush for chess-playing computers. Many manufacturers were hoping for high profits. I subsequently examined all of the 20 or more devices available on the market for Stiftung Warentest in Berlin. The large comparison test was published in Test magazine (volume 16, no. 8, August 1981, pages 22–29)."