Begining of computer chess : a detailed history (4)

[Vinvin]

From http://billwall.phpwebhosting.com/artic ... meline.htm
I think it's worth to copy in the forum as an archive.
Links to the 4 parts :
forum3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=80680
forum3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=80681
forum3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=80682
forum3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=80683
4th part : from 2000 to 2018 + References

On February 6, 2000, Crafty won Computer Chess Tournament (CCT) 1. The tournament was organized by Steve Mc Riley and played via the Internet Chess Club (ICC). There were 22 participants.

In August 2000, Deep Junior took part in the Super-Grandmaster tournament in Dortmund. It scored 50 percent and a performance rating of 2703.

On August 25, 2000, the 17th World Microcomputer Chess Championship (WMCCC) was held in London. It was won by Shredder. There were 14 participants.

On November 5, 2000, Shredder won Computer Chess Tournament (CCT) 2. It was organized by Will Singleton and played via the Internet Chess Club (ICC). There were 21 participants.

In November 2000, the UCI (Universal Chess Interface), a rival to the older XBoard/WinBoard Communication protocol, was developed. The standard was worked out by Stephan Meyer-Kahlen (1968- ), a German programmer. The UCI standard was presented by Rudolf Huber, a German computer scientist. The UCI protocol, a rival to the older XBoard/WinBoard Communication protocol, was used by only a few programs until ChessBase began to support this protocol in 2002.

On May 27, 2001, Ferret and Deep Fritz tied for 1st in Computer Chess Tournament (CCT) 3. The tournament was organized by James Swafford and played via the Internet Chess Club (ICC). There were 32 participants.

On August 23, 2001, Deep Junior won the 18th World Micro Computer Championship (WMCCC). The event was held in Maastricht, the Netherlands with 18 participants.

In 2002, Eugene Namimov received a ChessBase award for his work on a tablebase generator.

In 2002, the computer chess engine Zappa was created by Anthony Cozzie and initially released on February 2, 2005.

In January 2002, Chessbase began supporting the UCI protocol, which soon became the standard.

In January 2002, ChessBrain was founded. It was the world's largest leading distributed chess project. There were 2,070 individual contributors from 56 countries that were involved.

In 2002, the International Computer Chess Association was renamed the International Computer Games Association.

On January 27, 2002, Deep Junior 7 won the Computer Chess Tournament (CCT) 4. There were 46 participants.

In 2002, Hydra was developed by a team with Dr. Christian "Chrilly" Donninger, Dr. Ulf Lorenz, GM Christopher Lutz, and Muhammad Nasir Ali. Hydra was under the patronage of the PAL Group and Sheikh Tahnoon Bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, UAE.

From May 13 to May 18, 2002, a match between Grandmaster Mikhail Gurevich and Junior 7 was held in Greece. Junior won with 3 wins and 1 draw.

On July 6-11, 2002, the 10th World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) was held in Maastricht, Netherlands. The winner was Deep Junior after a playoff with Shredder (+7 =0 -1). There were 18 participants.

In October 2002, Vladimir Kramnik drew a match with Deep Fritz in Bahrain with a 4-4 score. Kramnik won games 2 and 3. Deep Fritz won games 5 and 6. The rest of the games (1, 7, and 8) were drawn.

In October 2002, Dr. L. Stephen Coles wrote an article called "Computer Chess: The Drosophila of AI." (source; Dr. Dobbs, Oct 30, 2002)

On January 19, 2003, Crafty, Yace, and Ruffian tied for 1st in Computer Chess Tournament (CCT) 5. There were 45 participants.

From January 26 to February 7, 2003, Garry Kasparov played Deep Junior 7 in New York City. The match ended in a draw. Kasparov won game 1. Deep Junior won game 3. The rest of the games (games 2, 4, 5, and 6) were drawn. This was the first time that a man/machine competition was sanctioned by FIDE. Deep Junior took 10 years to program by Tel Aviv programmers Amir Ban and Shay Bushinksy. It can evaluate 3 million moves a second, and positions 15 moves deep. The match was televised by ESPN2 and was watched by up to 300 million people.

In 2003, IM Vasik Rajlich (1971- ) started working on his chess program, later called Rybka ("little fish" in Czech and other Slavic languages).

In May 2003, David Gleich wrote a paper called "Machine Learning in Computer Chess: Genetic Programming and KRK." The author described genetic programming as a machine learning paradigm and he evaluated its results in attempting to learn basic chess rules. When applied to king vs rook and king chess endgame problems, genetic programming showed promising sesults in spite of its lack of significant chess knowledge.

On November 11-18, 2003, Kasparov played X3D Fritz in New York. The match was tied 2-2. Fritz won the 2nd game. Kasparov won the 3rd game. Games 1 and 4 were drawn. It was the first official world chess championship in total virtual reality, played in 3-D. Kasparov made his moves on a floating virtual reality chess board.

In November 2003, Celete Biever wrote a news article called, "Man Versus Machine Chess Match Drawn." The article was about the match between former world champion Garry Kasparov and the chess program X3D Fritz. The match score between the two was 2 — 2. (source: New Scientist, Nov 19, 2003)

From November 24-27, 2003, the 10th Advances in Computer Games (ACG) Conference took place in Graz, Austria. Lectures included computer chess evaluation functions and minimax on rook endgames. There were 6 research papers on chess and 6 research papers on Go.

From November 22-30, 2003, the 11th World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) was held in Graz. It was won by Shredder after a play-off with Deep Fritz (+9 =1 -1). 3rd place went to Brutus, which evolved into Hydra. There were 16 participants.

In 2003 the top chess computers were Shredder 7.04 (2810), Shredder 7.0 (2770), Fritz 8.0 (2762), Deep Fritz 7.0 (2761), Fritz 7.0 (2742), Shredder 6.0 (2724), and Chess Tiger 15.0 (2720).

In 2004, Eiko Bleicher published a paper on an endgame analysis tool (Freezer) for chess, called "Building Chess Endgame Databases for Positions with Many Pieces using A-priori Information."

In 2004, Tristan Caulfiled, University of Bath, published a thesis called "Acquiring and Using Knowledge in Computer Chess."

In January 2004, Rybka participated in the 6th Programmers Computer Chess Tournament (CCT6) and took 53rd place out of 54 competitors. It won 1 game, lost 5, and drew 3.

On February 1, 2004, Crafty, HIARCS, and Zappa tied for 1st in Computer Chess Tournament (CCT) 6. The event was organized by Volker Richey played via the Internet Chess Club. (ICC). There were 54 participants.

In April 2004, Rybka participated in Chess War V, finishing 23rd.

In April 2004, Rybka participated in the Swiss System 3 by Claude Dubois and took 71st with 6 wins, 6 losses, and 6 draws.

In April 2004, Naum, a computer chess engine by Canadian programmer Aleksandar Naumov, was initially released. In 2012, the development of Naum was discontinued.

From July 4-12, 2004, the 12th World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) was held at Bar-llan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. It was won by Deep Junior (programmed by Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky), scoring 7 wins and 4 draws.. Shredder took 2nd place, followed by Diep. Shredder won the 12th World Computer Speed Chess Championship. Crafty took 2nd place. There were 14 participants.

In 2004, the ChessBrain project was a chess program that distributed the search tree computation through the Internet.

On January 30, 2004, GM Peter Heine Nielsen (1973- ) played ChessBrain, a networked chess computer consisting of 2,070 computers across 56 countries, which simultaneously combined their processing power. The game, played in Copenhagen, ended in a draw after 34 moves.

In 2004, Hydra, a dedicated chess computer with custom hardware and 64 processors, defeated GM Evgeny Vladimirov with 3 wins and 1 draw. It then defeated former FIDE world champion Ruslan Ponomariov (rated 2710) in a 2-game match, winning both games.

In 2004, Fritz Reul made his M.Sc on computer chess and developed the computer chess engine LOOP. He then started his Ph.D. project "New Architectures in Computer Chess."

On Feb 13, 2005, Zappa won Computer Chess Tournament (CCT) 7. There were 44 participants.

In May 2005, ZackS [Zackary Stephen (1381), Steven Cramton (1685) and their Dell Pentium computers (running Shredder 8, Fritz 8, Junior 7, Gambit Tiger, and an Endgame table) ]won the first PAL/CSS Freestyle chess tournament, played on the ChessBase playchess.com site. The PAL/CSS tournaments are sponsored by the PAL Group/Consolidated Shipping Services (CSS) in Abu Dhabi, UAE. (source: ChessBase Online, June 22, 2005)

In June 2005, Hydra beat Michael Adams, the 7th ranked chess player in the world. Hydra won 5 games and drew one game.

From August 13-21, 2005, the 13th World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) was held at Reykjavik University in Iceland. It was won by Zappa (programmed by Anthony Cozzie), scoring 10 wins and 1 draw. 2nd place went to Fruit. Shredder won the speed championship, followed by Zappa. There were 12 participants.

In 2005, a team of computers (Hydra, Deep Junior, and Fritz) beat Vesilin Topalov, Ruslan Ponomariov, and Sergey Karjakin (average rating 2681) in a match by the score of 8.5 to 3.5.

In 2005, Graham Banks, Ray Banks, Sarah Bird, Kirill Kryukov, and Charles Smith founded the CCRL (Computer Chess Rating Lists)

In 2005, the Chess Engines Grand Tournament (CEGT) was founded and hosted by Heinz van Kempen.

On September 6-8, 2005, the 11th Advances in Computer Games (ACG) Conference was held in Taipei, Taiwan. There were lectures on opening-book handling, endgame databases, and automatic generation of search engines.

On December 2, 2005, the first Rybka beta was released. In a December 5, 2008, interview, Rajlich said, "…the publication of Fruit 2.1 was huge….I went through the Fruit 2.1 source code forwards and backwards and took many things."

In December 2005, Rybka participated in the 15th International Paderborn Computer Championship. Rybka took 1st place with a score of 5.5 out of 7.

In 2006, Marc Bourzutschky and Yakov Konoval started working on 7-man endgame tablebases. Yakov wrote a generator for 7-man endgame tablebases, and Marc wrote the verification program.

On February 26, 2006, Rybka won the Computer Chess Tournament (CCT) 8 with a score of 8 out of 9. Zappa, Junior, HIARCS, and The Baron tied for 2nd. There were 38 participants.

In April 2006, a team of Zor-champ, located in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) won the 2nd PAL/CSS Freestyle Chess Tournament. The team was driven by the program Hydra, which ran on multi-processor special-service hardware. 2nd place went to International Master Vasik Rajlich, assisted by his own program, Rybka. There were about 150 participants from 37 countries. (source: ChessBase Online, April 16, 2006)

In May 2006, Rybka took 1st at the 6th Leiden ICT with a score of 8.5 out of 9.

In May 2006, Marc Bourzutschky and Yakov Konoval discovered a KQNKRBN position that took 517 moves to checkmate. Later, when the Lomonosov 7-piece tablebase was being completed, a position was found with a depth-to-mate (DTM) of 546. (source: Chess Life, April 2013, p. 44)

From May 24 to June 1, 2006, the 14th World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC), and 11th Computer Olympiad, was held in Turin, Italy. It was won by Junior, rated at 2800, with a score of 9 out of 11. 2nd place went to Shredder (2810), followed by Rajlich (later called Rybka) (2820). There were 18 chess programs in this event (2 did not show up and 2 more withdrew for private reasons). The other participants were Shredder (2810), Rajlich (2820), Zappa (2830), Spike (2760), DIEP (2680), Jonny (2650), Crafty (2700), Ikarus (2660), IsiChess (2500), Delfi 4.6 (2450), Chiron (2400), ParSos (2620), Uragano3d (2100), Chaturanga (1900), LION 1.5 (2670), FIBChess (2000), and ETABETA (1440).

In June 2006, the Swedish Chess Computer Association, Svenska schackdatorfoereningen (SSDF) computer rating list was released. Top ranked Rybka 1.2 256MB Athlon 1200 MHz was rated with an estimated Elo rating of 2902. It was the first time a program on the list has passed the 2900 mark.

In July 2006, at the World Open in Philadelphia, two players were accused of cheating in chess by using computer assistance. One player was found to be using a wireless transmitter and receiver called "Phonito." He had a wireless device in his ear, claiming it was a hearing aid. He was disqualified from the event. The other player, wearing a hat, was suspected of cheating. The tournament director wanted to search this person. The suspect agreed, but first ducked into a bathroom. Although no device was found, there were suspicions that he used the bathroom visit to dispose of a miniature wireless receiver that might have been hidden in the hat he wore.

On July 16, 2006, Rybka, playing under the handle Rajlich (IM Vasik Rajlich and IM IwetaRadzievicz), tied for 1st (with Intagrand) at the 3rd PAL/CSS Freestyle main tournament. It then took clear 1st place in the final, a point ahead of the 2nd place finisher. The tournament was played on the ChessBase Playchess server.

In 2006, at a New Delhi tournament, an Indian player was caught using a chess computer via a Bluetooth-enabled device which as sewn in his cap. He had a Bluetooth headset sewn into the cap which he typically pulled down over his ears. An accomplice had been communicating with him outside the playing location. He was relaying moves from a computer chess program. The player was banned from competitive chess in India for 10 years.

In the 2006 Dutch open computer chess championship, Rybka 2.2 took 1st place with a score of 9 out of 9.

On October 22, 2006, Xakru (Jiri Dufek and Roman Chytilek from the Czech Republic) won the 4th PAL.CSS Freestyle tournament, held on the playchess.com server.

In December 2006, Rybka took 1st at the 16th International Paderborn Computer Chess Championship, with a score of 6.5 out of 7.

In December 2006, world champion Vladimir Kramnik was defeated by Deep Fritz, which won with a 4-2 score (2 wins and 4 draws). The match was played in Bonn, Germany.

In December 2006, HIARCS 11 was released and was the first version to support multiprocessing.

On February 18, 2007, Rybka won the Computer Chess Tournament (CCT) 9 event with a score of 6 out of 7, played via the Internet Chess Club (ICC). HIARCS, Scorpio and Skipe tied for 2nd. There were 52 participants.

On March 25, 2007, "Flying Saucers" (Dagh Nielsen from Denmark) won the 5th PAL.CSS Freestyle chess tournament. The event was played on the ChessBase Playchess server.

In May 2007, Rybka took 1st at the 7th Leiden ICT with a score of 7.5 out of 9.

In May 2007, a new chess engine called Strelka (Russian for "arrow") was introduced, written by Yuri Osipov. It was alleged that it was a reverse-engineered clone of Rybka 1.0 beta. Osipov, however, stated that Strelka was based on Fruit, not Rybka. When Strelka 2.0 beta was released, it included the source code. Rajlich claimed that the source code was his own and he wanted to re-release the program under his own name, although he never did. Fruit author Letouzey statd that Strelka 2.0 beta was a derivative of his Fruit program.

On June 18, 2007, the 15th World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) was held in Amsterdam and sponsored by the International Computer Games Association (ICGA). The winner was the USA program Rybka ("little fish"), programmed by International Master Vasik Rajlich, with a score of 10 out of 11 (defeating Shredder in the last round). 2nd place went to the USA program Zappa, programmed by Anthony Cozziem with 9 points. 3rd place went to Loop (Reul), with 7.5 points. Defending champion Junior, nor Fritz, did not participate. The German program Shredder won the blitz world championship. Rybka was later disqualified and the title went to Zappa. There were 12 participants.

In June, 2007, the "Ultimate Computer Challenge" was held in Elista. Deep Junior defeated Deep Fritz with the score of 4-2 (2 wins, 4 draws).

In June 2007, Rybka, playing under the handle Rajlich (Vasi Rajlich and IM Iweta Rajlich), won the 6th PAL/CSS Freestyle final. The event was played on the ChessBase Playchess server. There were 118 participants.

In August 2007, Grandmaster Joel Benjamin played a match with Rybka in which Rybka played without one of its pawns (pawn odds). Rybka won the match 4.5 - 3.5 (2 wins, 1 loss, 5 draws for Rybka).

In 2007, Rybka won the Dutch open computer chess championship with a score of 8 out of 9.

In September 2007, Zappa defeated Rybka in a match, 5.5-4.5. Rybka moved a pawn to avoid a draw under the 50-move rule, and lost after 180 moves.

On September 16, 2007, Ibermax (Anson Williams, England) won the 7th PAL/CSS Freestyle chess tournament. There were 95 participants.

In 2007, Rybka won the computer Chess960 tournament in Mainz.

In December 2007, HIARCS won over tie breaks against Rybka, with a score of 5.5 out of 7 at the 17th International Paderborn Computer Chess Championship.

In 2007, Rybka 2.3.1 Arena 256MB Athlon 1200 MHz was rated #1 in the world by SSDF with an estimated Elo rating of 2935.

On January 27, 2008, Rybka tied for with Naum (Aleksandar Naumov) 1st at the Computer Chess Tournament (CCT) 10 with the score of 5.5 out of 7. There were 36 participants.

In January 2008, Rybka defeated GM Joel Benjamin (1964- ) with a 6-2 score. Joel had White in every game. Also, every draw was scored as a win for Benjamin.

In March 2008, Rybka and Roman Dzindzichashvili (1944- ) drew 4-4 in their match. Rybka won 2, lost 2, with 4 draws. Dzindzichashvili had White every game and Rybka played without one of its pawns in every game.

From April 25-27, 2008, the 8th PAL/CSS Freestyle Tournament was played in the ChessBase playchess server. It was won by Ultima (Eros Riccio, Italy). There were 92 participants from 25 countries. The rapid event was won by Ultima. The tournament director was martin Fischer.

In 2008, at the Dubai Open, an Iranian player was caught receiving suggested moves by text message on his mobile phone. The game was being relayed live over the Internet and a friend was following it and guiding the player using a computer. The player was caught when he was looking into his mobile handset. When confronted, he immediately dropped his cell phone. On examining the handset, it was found that he had received SMS instructions in Farsi.

In August 2008, Paul Stevens of the University of Arizona began working on his computer chess program called PaulChess. It was written in Java.

On September 26, 2008, the SSDF computer rating list was released with Deep Rybka 3.2 GB Q660 2.4 GHz leading with an estimated Elo rating of 3228.

In September-October 2008, Rybka won the 16th World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC), held in Beijing, China, scoring 8 out of 9 (7 wins, 2 draws, no losses). HIARCS took 2nd and Junior took 3rd. Later, Rybka was disqualified, and HIARCS became the champion. There were 10 chess computers in this event.

In October 2008, Rybka was rated top in the CCRL, CEGT (Chess Engine Grand Tournament), CSS, SSDF, and WBEC rating lists.

In November 2008, Rybka won the 27th Open Dutch Computer Chess Championship, held in Leiden, with a score of 9 out of 9.

On November 2, 2008, Stockfish, a free and open-source UCI chess engine, was initially released. It is developed by Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski, Gary Linscott and Tord Romstad, with many contributions from a community of open-source developers. It is the strongest free chess engine (https://stockfish.org/).

In 2009, chess engines running on average hardware reached grandmaster level playing strength.

In 2009, Novag was sold to Solar Wide Industrial Ltd, which continued manufacturing Novag chess computers until 2014.

In 2009, IPON, the first pure chess engine rating list, was founded and hosted by Ingo Bauer. It is a German site for rating chess engines.

On March 2009 22, Rybka (Vasik Rajlich) won Computer Chess Tournament (CCT) 11, played via the Internet Chess Club with the score of 7.5 out of 9. There were 32 participants. Fruit and Bright tied for 2nd place.

In May 2009, Paul Stevens of the University of Arizona submitted his Computer Science thesis called "Computer Chess: Exploring Speed and Intelligence." The thesis presented a description of his computer chess program called PaulChess.

In May 2009, the chess program IPPOLIT was release by a team of anonymous programmers. In October 2009, Rajlich stated that IPPOLIT was a decompiled version of Rybka.

On May 11-13, 2009, the 12th Advances in Computer Games (ACG) Conference was held in Pamplona, Spain. There were lectures in chess tablebases and search-extension features.

In May 2009, the 17th World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) was held in Pamplona, Spain and won by Rybka (scoring 8 out of 9), followed by a 3-ways tie for 2nd between Shredder, Junior, and Deep Sjeng. Rybka was later disqualified and Shredder, Junior, and Deep Sjeng all tied for 1st. There were 10 participants.

In June 2009, all work with the Hydra chess computer was discontinued. The UAE sponsors decided to end the project.

In 2009, Deep Rybka 3.2 GB Q660 2.4 GHz was ranked #1 in the world by the SSDF with an estimated Elo rating of 3232.

On August 14, 2009, Pocket Fritz 4 on the mobile phone HTC Touch HD, won the Copa Mercosur chess tournament with a 9.5 out of 10 score. Pocket Fritz 4 searches less than 20,000 positions per second, as compared to Deep Blue, which searched 200 million positions per second. (source: chess.co.uk, Sep 30, 2011)

In 2009, chess engines running on slower hardware reached the grandmaster level.

In 2009, a computer created the longest solution to a composed chess program, requiring 545 moves.

During 2009-10, Rybka won the World Computer Speed Chess Championship. There were 28 participants.

In 2010, Hannibal chess engine was released, developed by Sam Hamilton ad Edsel Apostol.

In January 2010, Komodo, a UCI chess engine developed by Don Dailey, Mark Lefler, and Larry Kaufman, was initially released. Versions 8 and older are free. Later versions are commercial. (http://komodochess.com).

On Feb 21, 2010, Deep Sjeng won the Computer Chess Tournament (CCT) 12, organized by Peter Skinner. It was played over the Free Internet Servers (FICS). From September 24 to October 2, 2010, the 18th World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) was held in Kanazawa, Japan and won by Rybka, followed by Rondo and Thinker. The blitz tournament was also won by Rybka with 8/9 score. Rajlich received 1,000 euros ($1,593 USD) for his victory. Later, Rybka was disqualified, and Rondo and Thinker tied for 1st place. There were 10 chess computers in this event.

From September 24 to October 2, 2010, the 1st World Chess Software Championship (WCSC) was held in Kanazawa, Japan and won by Shredder (Stefan Meyer-Kahlen). Shredder won 7 and drew 2, losing none. There were 9 participants. The rules for the World Chess Software Championship stated that competing programs must run on machines with identical hardware specifications. Time control was game in 45 minutes with 15 second increment. All the programs were hosted on and Intel quad core Xeon 2.66 GHz, 8MB Hash machine. The other programs were Rondo, Thinker, Pandix, Deep Junior, Jonny, Darmenio, Fridolin, and Hector. The event was sponsored by the ICGA.

In 2010, Rybka won the 30th International Computer Chess Championship in Leiden (scoring 8 out of 9), followed by Spike, Deep Sjeng and Hiarcs.

Rybka 4 was released on May 26, 2010. Rybka 4 is a normal UCI engine, without copy protection.

Rybka won the 30th Dutch Computer Chess Championship in Leiden, followed by Spike, Deep Sjeng and Hiarcs.

On March 21, 2010, the latest SSDF computer rating list was released. Deep Rybka 3.2 GB Q660 2.4 GHz was ranked #1 with a rating of 3227.

On May 15, 2010, the UCI-protocol chess engine Houdini, developed by Belgian programmer Robert Houdart, was first released. It was influenced by open source engines IPPOLIT, Stockfish, and Crafty. The code was written in C++. Versions less than 2.0 were free. Later versions, 2.0 and onwards, are commercial.

In 2010, the Thoresen Chess Engine Completion (TCEC), now known as the Top Chess Engine Championship (renamed in 2014), was started. It is the de facto world chess championship for computers.

In February 2011, Houdini 1.5a defeated reigning computer chess champion Rybka 4.0 in a 40-game match. It was part of Season 1 of the TCEC tournament.

In April 2011, TCEC Season 2 was won by Houdini 1.5a. There was no Season 3.

In June 2011, the International Computer Games Association (ICGA) stripped Rybka of all its World Computer Chess Championship titles after discovering that Vasik Rajlich, who programmed Rybka, incorporated and plagiarized elements of older programs (Crafty and Fruit), without attribution. Rajlich violated the rule that each program must be the original work of the entering developers. Programming teams whose code from others must name all other authors, or the source of such code, in their submission details.

On June 29, 2011, after a 5-0 vote, Rybka was stripped of its titles, and Rajlich has now been banned for life in playing in computer chess championships. The ICGA disqualified and banned Rybka ants its programmer, Rajlich, from previous and future World Computer Chess Championships. Rajlich has denied using other code, saying that Rybka is 100% original at the source code level.

In September 2011, Cem Ozturan wrote his thesis "Chess Mentor: A Model of Chess Developed with Empirical Modelling Concepts" for his M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Warwick. The thesis aimed to create a practical and useable product called Chess Mentor and compare traditional approaches and empirical modelling solutions in a practical model.

On November 20-22, 2011, the 13th Advances in Computer Games (ACG) conference was held at Tilburg University. There were lectures on distributions of chess performances and position criticality in chess endgames.

In November 2011, the 19th World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC), held in Tilburg, was won by Junior. Shredder and HIARCS tied for 2nd. The other participants were Jonny, Pandix, The Baron, Booot, Rookie 3.4, and woodpusher 1997.

In November 2011, the 2nd World Chess Software Championship (WCSC) was held in Tilburg. It was won by HIARCS. Junior took 2nd place. The other participants were Pandix, Jonny, and Shredder.

In 2012, Critter chess engine was developed by Richard Vida. It is the top chess engine from Slovakia.

In 2012, Marjus Esser, Maastrich University, wrote a M. Sc. of Artificial Intelligence thesis called "Best-Reply Search in Multi-Player Chess." The author proposed four variants of the multi-player search algorithm best-reply search.

In June 2012, Garry Kasparov gave a lecture on the Turing "Paper Machine" at the University of Manchester's Alan Turing Centenary Conference. After the lecture, Kasparov actually played a chess game against the reconstructed version of Turing's chess program "Turbochamp." He played the first public game by a chess professional against the reconstructed Turing Paper Engine, which was operated by Frederic Friedel of ChessBase. Kasparov won in 16 moves. (source: ChessBase online, June 27, 2012)

In July 2012, Vladimir Makhnychev and Victor Zakharov from Moscow State University, completed 4+3 Depth to mate (DTM)-tablebases (525 endings including KPPPKPP). The tablebases were named Lomonosov tablebases, after a supercomputer called Lomonosov used in the calculations. The next set of 5+2 DTM-tablebases (350 endings including KPPPPKP) was completed during August 2012.

As of 2012, all 7 and fewer piece (2 kings and up to 5 other pieces) endgames have been solved. The size of the seven-man (2 kings and 5 other pieces and/or pawns) is about 140 terrabytes.

In 2013, the Fast GMs Rating List (FGRL), hosted by Andreas Strangmueller, was founded to rate chess computers.

In 2013, the G 6 rating list for computers was founded by Luca Lissandrello.

In January 2013, the movie Computer Chess, directed by Andrew Bujalski was released. It was about computer chess programmers in the early 1980s. The film won the 2013 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize.

In April 2013, Syzygy tablebases were developed by Ronald de Man, in a form optimized for use by a chess program during search. Syzygy tablebases are available for all 6 piece endings and some 7 piece endings, and are now supported by many top engines, including Komodo, Deep Fritz, Houdini, and Stockfish.

In May 2013, TCEC Season 4 was won by Houdini 3.

From August 12-17, 2013, the 20th World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) was held at Keio University in Yokohama. It was won by Junior, scoring 7.5 out of 10 (6 wins, 3 draws, 1 loss). There were 6 participants: Junior, Jonny, HIARCS, Pandix, Shredder, and Merlin. The speed championship was won by Shredder, scoring 4.5 out of 6. (source: Haworth, Krabbenbos & van den Herik, "WCCC 2013: the 20th World Chess Software Championship," ICGA Journal, Vol 36, # 3, 2013, pp. 151-158)

From August 12-18, 2013, the 3rd World Chess Software Championship (WCSC) was held in Yokohama. It was won by HIARCS, scoring 7-2 (5 wins, 4 draws, and 1 loss). There were 6 participants, all using the same platform. The platform was an HP ELITEBOOK 8570W, with 16GB of RAM, 500GB HDD, and a 4-coreIntel i7 3740QM Ivy Bridge processor supporting a potential 8 threads of activity. The other participants were Pandix, Junior, Jonny, Shredder, and Merlin. (source: Haworth, Krabbenbos & van den Herik, "WCSC 2013: the 3rd World Chess Software Championship," ICGA Journal, Vol 36, # 3, 2013, pp. 159-165)

In December 2013, TCEC Season 5 was won by Komodo 1142.

U. Chakraborty and D. Sharma published a paper called "An Improved Chess Machine base on Artificial Neural Networks." (source: International Journal of Computer Applications, 2014)

In 2014, the top chess engines were: Komodo 8 (3322), Stockfish 5 (3300), Houdini 4 (3297), Gull 2.8b (3221), Equinox 3.20 (3201), Critter 1.6a (3188), and Rybka 4.1 (3175).

On May 12, 2014, Frank Quisinsky started the FCT computer rating list.

In May 2014, TCEC Season 6 was won by Stockfish 170514.

Kieran Greer published "Dynamic Move Chains and Move Tables in Computer Chess" archived at the Cornell University Library, March 2015.

Abdullah Al-Saedi and Alu Mohammed published a paper called "Design and Implementation of Chess-Playing Robotic System." (source: International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Technology, Vol 5, Issue 5, pp. 90-98, May 2015)

On July 1-3, 2015, the 14th Advances in Computer Games (ACG) conference was held at Leiden University.

From June 29 to July 3, 2015, the 21st World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) was held at Leiden University. It was won by Jonny, scoring 7 out of 8 (6 wins, 2 draws, and no losses). There were 9 participants: Jonny, Komodo, HIARCS, Protector, Shredder, Ginkgo, The Baron, Maverick, and Fridolin. (source: Haworth, Krabbenbos & van den Herik, "WCCC 2015: the 21st World Computer Championship," ICGA Journal, Vol 38, # 2, 2015, pp. 102-113)

On July 5, 2015, Shredder won the 4th World Chess Software Championship (WCSC), held at Leiden University. The other participants were Ginkgo, Komodo, Protector, HIARCS, Jonny, Maverick, and Fridolin. participants. The hardware was an Intel quad core i7 processor. Shredder and Ginkgo tied for 1st, but Shredder on the blitz play-off. (source: Haworth, Krabbenbos & van den Herik, "WCSC 2015: the World Chess Software Championship," ICGA Journal, Vol 38, # 2, 2015, pp. 114-122)

In 2015, BootChess was created by French assembly coder Olivier Poudade, and uses only 487 bytes. It is the world's smallest chess program ever. It The previous record holder for the smallest chess program was the 672 byte 1K ZX Chess, built by David Horne in 1982 for a Sinclair computer. BootChess runs on windows, Linux, OS X, DOS or BSD, but lacks a graphical chessboard. Instead, the board squares are a grid of periods and the pieces are represented as PNBRQK.

In 2015, Super Micro was the smallest computer implementation of chess on any platform at a size of only 455 bytes.

In 2015, chess engine Komodo played a series of handicap matches with GM Sergej Movsesian, GM Martin Petr, GM Petr Neuman, FM Victor Bolzoni, FM John Meyer, Mark Gray and FM Larry Gilden. These games included one pawn, two pawns, exchange (rook for knight), and knight odds. Komodo fared well in all of these games, drawing a majority but winning at least one in all configuration.

In November 2015, TCEC Season 8 was won by Komodo 9.3x.

In February 2016, Stockfish was the top-rated chess program on the IPON rating list.

In 2016, the Swedish Chess Computer Association rated computer program Komodo at 3361.

From June 27 to July 1, 2016, the 22nd World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) was held at Leiden University. It was won by Komodo after a tiebreak match (5 draws and 1 won) against Jonny. The other participants were Shredder, GridGinkgo, HIARCS, and Raptor. (source: Haworth, Krabbenbos & van den Herik, "WCCC 2016: the 22nd World Computer Chess Championship," ICGA Journal, Vol 39, # 1, 2017, pp. 47-59)

From July 2-3, 2016, the 5th World Chess Software Championship (WCSC) was held at Leiden University. It was won by Komodo (4 wins, 2 draws, no losses). There were 7 participants: Komodo, Jonny, Shredder, Raptor, HIARCS, Grid, Ginkgo, and The Baron (Richard Pijl). (sources : ChessBase Online, July 5, 2016, and Haworth, Krabbenbos, & van den Herik, "WCSC 2016: the 6th World Chess Software Championship," ICGA Journal, Vol 39, # 2, 2017, pp. 151-159)

In July 2016, the World Speed Computer Championship (WSCC) was held at Leiden University. The games were played with a 5-minute time control, plus 5 seconds per move added. Jonny and Shredder tied with 6.5 out of 10. The other participants were Komodo, HIARCS, Raptor, and GridGinkgo. (source: Haworth, Krabbenbos, & van den Herik, "WSCC 2016: the World Speed Computer Chess Championship," ICGA Journal, Vol 39, # 2, 2017, pp. 160-162)

In September 2016, TCEC Season 9 Rapid match was won by Houdini 200716 over Komodo 1691.19.

In December 2016, TCEC Season 9 was won by Stockfish 8.

In 2017, some dedicated chess computers were being advertised and sold. The Millennium Chess Master II Chess Computer (USCF 1600) sold for $59.95. The Millennium Karpov Chess School Chess Computer (1600) sold for $69.95. The Millennium ChessGenius Chess Computer (2200) sold for $149.95. The Millennium ChessGenius Pro Chess Computer (2400) sold for $219.95. The Millennium ChessGenius Exclusive Chess Computer (2600) sold for $699.95. (source: Chess Life, May 2017)

In 2017, the top chess engines were Komodo 10.4 (3392), Stockfish 8 (3391), and Houdini 5.01 (3388).

In 2017, Komodo 10.1 64-bit 4CPU had an Elo rating of 3377.

In 2017, a computer engine called Zor won the freestyle Ultimate Chess Challenge tournament. The best human plus computer player came in 3rd place.

The May 14, 2017 Owl Computer Chess Engines Rating List included Stockfish 8 (3535), Houdini 5.01 (3513), Komodo 10.4 (3503), Shredder 13 (3357), Fire 5 (3320), Gull 3 (3273), Andscacs (3255), Critter (3248), Equinox (3229), Fizbo 1.9 (3233), and Fritz 15 (3212).

From July 1-2, 2017, the 6th World Chess Software Championship (WCSC) took place at Leiden University. The winner was Shredder. The other participants were Komodo, Jonny, Chiron, The Baron, Ziggurat, and Chess Ebbiz 9.

On July 3-5, 2017, the 15th Advances in Computer Chess (ACG) conference was held at Leiden University.

From July 3-7, 2017, the 23rd World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) was held at Leiden University. The winner was Komodo on a 6-game tiebreak match over Jonny. There were 4 participants: Komodo, Jonny, Shredder, and Chiron. (source: Haworth, Krabbenbos, & van den Herik, "WCCC 2017: the 23rd World Computer Chess Championship," ICGA Journal, Vol 39, # 3-4, 2018, pp. 210-221)

In November 2017, chess.com held an open tournament of the ten strongest chess engines, leading to a "Super final" tournament between the two finalists - Stockfish and Houdini. In the 20-game Super final, Stockfish won over Houdini with a score 10.5-9.5. Five games were decisive, with 15 ending in a draw.

In December 2017, AlphaZero defeated Stockfish with 28 wins, no losses, and 72 draws. AlphaZero was calculating 80,000 positions per second, while Stockfish was calculating 70 million positions per second. (source: ChessBase Online, Dec 6, 2017)

On December 5, 2017, the Google DeepMind group of London published a paper called "Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm." Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in chess and shogi, and convincingly defeated a world champion program in each case.

In December 2017, Houdini 6.03 won the Premier Division of the "Top Chess Engine Championships" (TCEC), Season 10. Komodo 11 took 2nd place. Houdini beat Komodo in a 100-game match, scoring 53-47. (source: ChessBase, Dec 13, 2017)

In 2018, chess.com closed over 163,000 accounts for cheating by using chess computers and chess engines. Some of the excuses were: "Yes, I had a chess engine open, but it was only checking on a previous game I played," or "My engine was only running in background to prepare my openings," or "I was sure others were using [chess engines] too." (source: Chess Life, Feb 2018, p. 25)

In 2018, the top chess engines were Stockfish 9 (3444), Houdini (3407), Komodo (3407), Fire (3296), Deep Shredder (3291), Fizbo (3282), Andscacs (3252), Booot (3226), Fritz 16 (3203), and Chiron (3201).

On May 14, 2018, Komodo 12, its latest version, was released.

On June 3, 2018, Zor won the 33rd Engine Masters Chess Tournament.

On June 13, 2018, Komodo 12 won the Premier Division of the "Top Chess Engine Championships" (TCEC), Season 12. Stockfish took 2nd place. (source: ChessBase, June 19, 2018)

In July 2018, the 24th World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) was held in Stockholm. The winner was Komodo. There were 8 participants. The event was sponsored by the International Computer Games Association (ICGA).

In July 2018, the 7th World Chess Software Championship (WCSC) was held in Stockholm. It was won by Komodo. There were 9 participants. All programs ran on an Intel quad core i7, 1.8 GHz machine with 16MB of hash memory.

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[Frank Quisinsky]

Hi Vinvin,

the idea with Winboard forum is from Volker Pittlik, not from me!

I started with Volker the Winboard site with the main interest to power the winboard protocol with detail sites to each of the winboard engines. So Volker is working on Winboard Forum and I am working with Michael Diosi and Gambit-Soft on Winboard site. After Winboard Engine 100 I gave my site Thomas Meyer, later Thomas Meyer gave the site Leo Dijksman. Here I had luck and found programmers of stronger engines support the idea, like the programmer of SOS, Gandalf and all the French programmers do that directly. Prof. Djordje Vidanovic wrote many mails the French programmers (Pharaon / ZChess, Dragon, AnMon, Nejmet, La Dame Blanche, Capture and different others). With Kai Skibbe and Christian Koch the first Winboard Rating List are available (a long time before CEGT, CCRL). The Winboard site are often in FIDE rating list on place 1 from all chess sites in www with around 2000 - 4000 different IPs daily.

What I do here was very simple. A co-operation with Gambit-Soft. Gambit-Soft was also a very big computer chess site.
So I organice tournaments with Gambit-Soft and Millennium ...
Deep Shredder vs. The World with over 1.000 persons daily like to play and sent moves. Every day with prices from me with sponsors (I found a German bank to give DGT boards in cooperation with DGT projects) or Gambit-Soft or from Millennium.

The first online event from a chess program I organice with Gambit-Soft ...
Gambit-Soft Forum vs. IM Klarenbeek ... this was the first ever.

In combination with Gambit-Soft and the first German computer chess forum from Gambit-Soft I support later other computer chess fora. Like to start the CSS Forum, the Arena Support Forum, the forum by Kurt Kispert (Chess Computers). I create the fora with parsimony. The first parsimony forum are the private programming from Eva Marbach for Berthold Seifriz (Gambit-Soft-Forum). Later the company "Parsimony" are build.

Later I started with Martin Blume the Arena GUI development.
Here the idea is a free and strong GUI for Winboard and UCI protocol. In the year I gave up my work (in my opinion Arena was ready) we had 3.5 Millions of downloads on sites like ComputerBild in Poland, Germany ... strong chess sites helps here. All the news sites from Argentina and different others. The link to Arena are available on more as 200 countrys in the World. Here Michael Diosi helps and with Michael I made the link selection better and better. To that time I think we had the strongest link selection to chess sites in www and this was the main reason that we had 2.000 - 4.000 different IPs on our winboard site, later on Arena site. Michael Diosi was the most faitful helper and supporter. English corrections made Alfred Palang (USA), member of TalkChess.

Later Arena was the first GUI support Fischer Random Chess / Chess 960.
This was the idea from Albert Vasse (DGT projects) because no of the others, the commercials have interest to support that). After Arena support the others support the idea too, first here after Arena was Stefan Meyer-Kahlen with an other castling rules and after Chessbase. Here Reinhold Scharnagl do a lot help us and wrote a chess book about it. The biggest chess 960 supporters are Reinhold Scharnagl and Albert Vasse and the programmers I found to add the support. First chess engine with FRC support was Betsy!

Arena had over 250 beta testers and supporters. Helps with translations and many, many other things around the project. I think this was the biggest project others can do a bit before Stockfish. For me the greatest project ever is Stockfish and the work Franz Huber do with older chess computers and the chess computer forum. But what we do with Arena was also great and important for chess history. With Winboard and Arena many people found computer chess more interesting and many people the community have comes from this activities.

My rating systems:
SWCR (here GM Jörg Hickl support this) ... Schach-Welt-Computer-Ratings (German chess newsletter), runs a long time.
Here are important w32 and x64 differents. Runs around up to 2010 for 2 years.

Later
FCP (runs around end of 2016).

Later
FCP-Tourneys ...
With long time controls and 41.000 games and the rating list I closed for some reasons middle of the year.

Not all what I do but the most important things!

Best
Frank

So I wrote in that time around 200.000 support eMails or eMails important for organizations and beta test. Made many interviews with chess programmers and so one.

[Vinvin]

Hi Vinvin,

the idea with Winboard forum is from Volker Pittlik, not from me!

I started with Volker the Winboard site with the main interest to power the winboard protocol ...

Thanks For the correction !

[Ajedrecista]

Hello Vincent:

Great stuff! I was not aware of it. However, I miss at least two important milestones in this part from 2000 to 2018:

1.- Fishtest. This testing framework has made possible —and still does— that SF has gained a few hundreds of Elo over the years. The own SF testing framework dates its beginning on 1st March, 2013 (source at 'Fishtest History').

2.- The generation of all 7-man Syzygy EGTB. Great computational effort of five months, officialy announced on 19th August, 2018 (announcement here). It is true that the Syzygy news is a bit on the ropes of the timeline. The paragraph starting with 'In April 2013, [...]' mentions that some 7-man Syzygy EGTB are available, so it looks like the timeline was discontinued just before the big news.

Other minor, yet important milestone for me would be the computation of some Perft values of the initial position (not only in this part since 2000).

All in all, very nice find! Congratulations. I fully agree with you about that this computer chess timeline is worth copying to the forum as an archive.

Regards from Spain.

Ajedrecista.