bob wrote:I have a signed photo of Claude Shannon with a KRK machine he developed in the 1950's... I was not aware there was one done earlier... Shannon's is based on relays and such, not mechanics.
I saw a photograph of Shannon's electromechanical chess endgame computer, printed in Adventures in Chess by Edward Lasker. The machine was about the size of a large footstool. The playing board was about 30 cm on a side and it looked like each square had a switch and a lamp. The report by Lasker is that Shannon's machine could handle endgames with up to six men.
I would dearly like to get the schematic. Was Shannon working for Bell Labs at the time? Maybe the machine is still intact and is sitting in a storeroom somewhere in Murray Hill.
I have a link to a surplus electronics store that sells the relays that were used in telephone switching offices prior to the Transistor Age. These relays can be had by the thousand at only US$0.25 each, so it might not be too expensive to re-create the machine and perhaps add some improvements.
I believe that "6 man ending" statement was in error. I talked to Claude Shannon when he gave me this photo and he was emphatic that it was a KR vs K and that it would always mate with the rook, although not always "optimally".
That thing you are describing seems to be about the right size. In the photo I have, he is kneeling down beside the thing with someone else in the photo. When I get to the office tomorrow I will see if my memory is correct about the specifics of the photo and what the thing could do.
More to follow...
This one?
Shannon and Lasker at Shannon's chess machine, ca 1950, Gift of Monroe Newborn from The Computer History Museum
Computer pioneer Claude Shannon and chess champion Edward Lasker at MIT, ponder the computational aspects of playing chess at Shannon's early relay-based chess machine.
Gerd Isenberg wrote:Shannon and Lasker at Shannon's chess machine, ca 1950, Gift of Monroe Newborn from The Computer History Museum
Computer pioneer Claude Shannon and chess champion Edward Lasker at MIT, ponder the computational aspects of playing chess at Shannon's early relay-based chess machine.
The picture is the one which appeared in Adventures in Chess. That is Edward Lasker on the left. He lived into his nineties, long enough to have played the Northwestern Chess 4.x program.
bob wrote:I have a signed photo of Claude Shannon with a KRK machine he developed in the 1950's... I was not aware there was one done earlier... Shannon's is based on relays and such, not mechanics.
I saw a photograph of Shannon's electromechanical chess endgame computer, printed in Adventures in Chess by Edward Lasker. The machine was about the size of a large footstool. The playing board was about 30 cm on a side and it looked like each square had a switch and a lamp. The report by Lasker is that Shannon's machine could handle endgames with up to six men.
I would dearly like to get the schematic. Was Shannon working for Bell Labs at the time? Maybe the machine is still intact and is sitting in a storeroom somewhere in Murray Hill.
I have a link to a surplus electronics store that sells the relays that were used in telephone switching offices prior to the Transistor Age. These relays can be had by the thousand at only US$0.25 each, so it might not be too expensive to re-create the machine and perhaps add some improvements.
I believe that "6 man ending" statement was in error. I talked to Claude Shannon when he gave me this photo and he was emphatic that it was a KR vs K and that it would always mate with the rook, although not always "optimally".
That thing you are describing seems to be about the right size. In the photo I have, he is kneeling down beside the thing with someone else in the photo. When I get to the office tomorrow I will see if my memory is correct about the specifics of the photo and what the thing could do.
More to follow...
This one?
Shannon and Lasker at Shannon's chess machine, ca 1950, Gift of Monroe Newborn from The Computer History Museum
Computer pioneer Claude Shannon and chess champion Edward Lasker at MIT, ponder the computational aspects of playing chess at Shannon's early relay-based chess machine.
Good find. Yes. And Steven was correct. The note from Shannon said that this was a photo of him and Edward Lasker. And it also said this thing could handle up to 6 pieces, with some randomness built in so that it would not always play the same move...
I wonder if it had a chance in things like KRP vs KR, however...
bob wrote:The note from Shannon said that this was a photo of him and Edward Lasker. And it also said this thing could handle up to 6 pieces, with some randomness built in so that it would not always play the same move...
I wonder if it had a chance in things like KRP vs KR, however...
Edward Lasker was a smart guy (a strong IM and an engineer, too) and was impressed. Lasker also wrote about the late 1950s Bernstein program and was quite familiar with its theory and implementation.
Lasker also compared the nascent computer chess machines to the automatons Ajeeb and Mephisto. He suggested that like the automatons which hid their human operators in a box of rubber gears, the new programs hid their authors behind a box of electronics and so were not all that different.
After spending too much time thinking about this, I see how it might be done using 1950s technology and still be small enough to fit into a box a half meter on a side.
The idea is to organize the machine into a set of functional units controlled by a few servomotor driven encoded rotors. The result is somewhat like an electromechanical pinball machine of that era.
A single master rotor, driven by a slow speed motor, provides the main program. Each track on the rotor controls a single functional unit which is powered or unpowered according to the bit under a read head for that track and sector. Some additional circuitry can supply special timing for the master rotor advancement.
Subroutines are implemented by having a separate, slave rotor for each routine and which are controlled by the master rotor.
RAM and its addressing is implemented with near-trivial relay logic.
For a ply indexed look ahead stack, a vector of relay registers is indexed by a reversible stepper motor which advances and retracts under control of the main rotor or one of the slaves.
The functional units are mostly simple relay logic and are used for data bus gating, arithmetic operations, switch sensing, and lamp driving.
Perhaps the most complex subsystem would be a pair of slave rotors which generated man motion. The first would select a direction or interest and the second would drive an accumulator which generated a square index. Each track on these rotors would correspond to a different color/piece and an extra pair for pawn advance vs pawn captures.
A move execute rotor would update the board and a move retract rotor would do the reverse. There would also need to be subsystems for detecting check and checkmate status, material total updates, and whatever positional scoring that might fit.
I got a chance to see this monster in operation. It is very impressive! Professor Porter starts a software multiply at the beginning of the lecture, continues speaking with it clicking and clanking in the background, and completion triggers a flashbulb somewhere towards the end of his slides. Since it is made of relays, it has improved in reliability over time.
The other irony, it has 64K of memory: a tiny chip dwarfed by the four cabinets of relays. (I asked whether he had considered using magnetic core for the retro cred, but he said it would have been too hard to control, much less acquire.)
My first thought on seeing the photo of Professor Porter's home deployment of his noisy relay computer in his bedroom is that his wife must be of a very understanding sort.
His machine could be programmed to play chess, albeit glacially slowly as electromechanical relays can't be reliably clocked much above five Hz. A dedicated chess relay machine as I described above would be much faster and could produce a reasonable move in a simple endgame in a few minutes or so.
Also, a correction: the relays in Porter's computer are all of the 4PDT kind, not DPDT. They cost about US$4 each. Few of its circuits need 4PDT relays and these which do, like the clever adder designed by Konrad Zuse in the 1930s, can be implemented using 4 SPDT relays per each 4PDT relay.
