World’s Smallest Chess Gizmo

An article, “Tiny Chess Playing Computer,” by James Hobson, appeared recently on the Hack A Day website. (http://hackaday.com/2013/09/15/tiny-chess-playing-computer/)
“PIC Blitz has a full fledged chess library: it knows all the moves, all the basic openings and even changes its evaluation function weights as the game progresses to keep the game interesting. The creator [Mark Owen] quips about some of the additional techniques he utilized to make up for the limited processing power; including “pondering time”, a difficult and slow user interface, and of course, a barely-comprehensible LCD.”
There is a picture of the innards of the tiny gizmo and much more information, including a section, Related Hacks, which includes a link to a “Voice controlled chess robot.” It was built “…as a final project for their Georgia Tech ECE 4180 Embedded Systems Design class.” I wonder if the gizmo is called “Hal?”

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