One of the first books I read about BASIC had a checkers game in it. The whole point of the game was to show how recursive algorithms worked (that was the AI, I

One of the first books I read about BASIC had a checkers game in it. The whole point of the game was to show how recursive algorithms worked (that was the AI, I don't remember any more details on it). One of the exercises at the end of the chapter was, "Improve the checkers program to play chess" Not sure if the author was kidding or not. I don't remember any strong BASIC chess engines, but there were quite a few 8-bit engines that were fairly decent in those days.