Humans are probably worse with knights than any other piece, relative to computers. Queen is a possible second; queen endgames are super-complex for humans sinc

Humans are probably worse with knights than any other piece, relative to computers. Queen is a possible second; queen endgames are super-complex for humans since there are so many options and very few of them can be easily pruned. (I guess you can say that humans are bad with knights and computers are good with queens, especially endgame queens.) Diagonal sliders do create lots of headaches for bitboards, but those were not used for chess before 1967 or so, i.e., more than a decade later. Generally one uses magic bitboards today (basically a perfect hashing technique to extract the bits of the diagonals a piece can attack into a neat little linear bit line), but they depend on fast multiplier and a fair amount of RAM for LUTs, which would of course not have been available on the MANIAC. I would assume that MANIAC just looped over all possible moves in the move generation phase.