Begining of computer chess : a detailed history (1)

[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
1st part : from 1912 to 1969

Here is a timeline of some of the major events in computer chess.

In 1912, Leonardo Torres y Quevedo (1852-1936) built an electro-mechanical machine that could play King and Rook versus King endgames. It was called El Ajedrecista (the chessplayer). It was first demonstrated publicly in 1914 at the Paris World's Fair. It used a mechanical arm to make its moves, and electrical sensors to detect its opponent's replies in a King vs. King + Rook endgame. The writer of a Scientific American article on the device was worried that machinery might someday substitute for the human mind. (source: "Torres and His Remarkable Automatic Devices," Scientific American, Supplement 80, Nov 6, 1915, p. 296).

In 1920, a second version of El Ajedrecista was constructed that eliminated the arm and moved the chess pieces via magnets under the board instead. It was made by Gonzalo Torres y Quevedo, the son of Leonardo Torres y Quevedo. This version now resides in a museum at Madrid's Polytechnic University.

In 1922, the second version of El Ajedrecista was exhibited in Paris.

In 1941, the German engineer and computer pioneer Konrad Zuse (1910-1995) developed the first computer chess-playing algorithm. Because of the circumstances of the Second World War, however, they were not published, and did not come to light until the 1970s. Zuse (pronounced tsu-ze) is considered the inventor of the world's first programmable computer, and the first high-level programming language. Zuse wrote, "The link with mathematical logic had already been established. As a civil engineer I was attracted by the prospect of drawing on predicate and relational calculus and exploring the possibilities they offered as a basis for computing. Take the frameworks used in building construction for example-were they not similar to the graphs used in relational calculus? Using pair lists, it was relatively easy to digitalize the structure of a framework with the aid of relational calculus, in other words, to break it down into its component data. This could then be entered into the combination memory, which had been invented by this time, and serve as a basis for combination calculations. This ought to mean that not only purely numerical calculations could be dealt with, but construction design itself. Up till now only the human mind had been capable of this. The same idea applied to frameworks and other types of building design. I became extremely preoccupied with this new aspect of computing. I even went as far as learning to play chess in order to try to formulate the rules of the game in terms of logical calculus. Chess offered a mass of data structures within a limited space. A symbolic language (the expression "algorithmic language" was unknown to me at the time) that could describe chess problems seemed to me to be suitable for all computer machine problems. Plankalkül was later (1945) devised with this principle in mind." (source: Computer Pioneers — Konrad Zuse - http://history.computer.org/pioneers/zuse.html)

In 1942, Zuse began writing a computer chess program in Plankalkul (high-level programming language) on punched cards.

In 1944, John von Neumann (1903-1957) and Oskar Morgenstern (1902-1977) began studying the general theory of games. They presented the minimax algorithm and showed how it applied, in theory, to the game of chess. Neumann classified chess as a two-player zero-sum game with perfect information.

In 1945, Zuse formulated chess program routines in his high-level programming language Plankalkül.

In 1945, Alan M. Turing (1912-1954) used chess-playing as an example of what a computer could do. Turing himself was a weak chess player.

In 1946, Alan Turing made his first reference to machine intelligence in connection with chess-playing.

In 1947, Alan Turing specified the first chess program for chess.

In 1947, Turing challenged British researcher and computer pioneer Donald Michie (1923-2007) to see who could first write a simple chess-playing algorithm. Michie was a stronger chess player than Turing. Michie returned to Oxford and began exploring ways of developing "paper machines" that could play chess.

In 1948, Alan Turing and mathematician D. G. Champernowne (1912-2000) began work on his "paper machine" Turbochamp program.

In 1948, a chess program called Machiavelli was developed by Donald Michie and Shaun Wylie (1913-2009). This was a rival "paper machine" of Alan Turing's Turbochamp.

In 1948, Alan Turing began working on his chess algorithm and finished it in 1950. The algorithm was crude. Its logic was based on just a few of the most basic rules of chess, and it was only able to "think" two moves in advance.

In 1948, American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) wrote a book called Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine. In it, he described how a chess program could be developed using a depth-limited minimax search with an evaluation function. He wrote, "It would probably win over a stupid or careless chess player, and would almost certainly lose to a careful player of any considerable degree of proficiency. In other words, it might very well be as good a player as the vast majority of the human race. This does not mean that it would reach the degree of proficiency of Maelzel's fraudulent machine, but, for all that, it may attain a pretty fair level of accomplishment." (source: Cybernetics, 2nd edition, 1961, p. 164)

Wiener himself was a poor chess player. When Wiener was asked why he was so great as a mathematician, but so lousy at chess, he replied, "In chess you're only as good as your worst move. In mathematics you're as good as your best move."

In October 1948, Claude E. Shannon (1916-2001), a research worker at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, began developing an idea of how to program a digital computer to play chess. He estimated that the number of nodes in the complete chess tree to be 10 raised to the 120th power. Shannon categorized two types of search. Type A was a brute-force search looking at every variation to a given depth, and favored by fast processors. Type B was a selective search looking at important branches only.

In 1948 the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) computer was advertised as the strongest computer in the world. So strong, that it could play chess and gin rummy so perfectly that no human opponent could beat it.

In 1949, Tihamer Nemes (1895-1960) of Hungary designed and constructed an electro-mechanical chess machine. He built a chess machine for solving two-move chess problems. (source: CHESS, Nov 1949, p. 38)

On March 9, 1949, Shannon presented a paper called "Programming a Digital Computer for Playing Chess." The paper was presented at the National Institute for Radio Engineers Convention in New York. He described how to program a computer to play chess based on position scoring and move selection. He proposed basic strategies for restricting the number of possibilities to be considered in a game of chess. Shannon was an avid chess player. He first proposed his idea of programming a computer for chess at the National Institute for Radio Engineers (IRE) Convention in New York.

In 1949, Shannon built an "electric chess automaton." It could handle 6 pieces and was used to test programming methods. (source: Chess Review, Jan 1951, p. 13)

In 1950, Alan Turing wrote the first computer chess program. The same year he proposed the Turing Test that in time, a computer could be programmed (such as playing chess) to acquire abilities rivaling human intelligence. If a human did not see the other human or computer during an imitation game such as chess, he/she would not know the difference between the human and the computer.

In 1950 Claude Shannon devised a chess playing program that appeared in the paper "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess." This was the first article on computer chess. (source: Philosophical Magazine, Vol. 41, 1950, pp. 256-275)

In March 1950, Shannon published "A Chess-Playing Machine" in Scientific American. The article was concerned with the problem of constructing a computing routine or "program" for a computer to enable it to play chess. (source: Scientific American, Feb 1, 1950, Vol. 182, # 2, pp. 48-51)

In April 1950, Edward Lasker wrote an article "20th Century Chess Playing Automata." (source: Chess Review, April 1950, pp. 104-108)

In 1951, Turing tried to implement his "Turbochamp" program on the Ferranti Mark I computer at Manchester University. This was the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer. He never completed the task. However, his colleague, Dr. Dietrich Prinz (1903-1989), wrote a chess playing computer program for the Ferranti Mark 1 computer that solved simple mates in two moves.

In 1951, the electromagnetic automatic chess player constructed by Gonzales Torres y Quevedo was demonstrated at the Cybernetics Conference in Paris. Gonzales demonstrated the machine to Norbert Wiener at the conference.

In November 1951, the first chess-solving program was written by Prinz for the Mark 1 computer. The program would examine every possible move until a solution was found. It took about 15 minutes to solve a mate in two moves and print the solution. It looked at 450 possible moves, of which 100 were illegal. It averaged about 2 seconds per move on average. (source: Research, 1952, Vol. 6, p. 261 and Faster Than Thought, Bowden, 1953, pp. 296)

In 1952 Alick Glennie (1925-2003), who wrote the first computer compiler, defeated Alan Turing's paper-printed chess program, TurboChamp, in 29 moves. Glennie was the first person to beat a computer program at chess. Turing never finished his chess-playing program. When it was Turing's turn to make a move, he would consult the algorithm and use its "logic" to decide which pieces to move, and where. Because he had to analyze every move as his program would, Turing took upwards of 30 minutes to work through the strategy each time his turn came. "Turbochamp "showed it was fully capable of playing against a human in chess — but not winning. Glennie defeated Turing in just 29 moves.

In May 1952, W. Ross Ashby (1903-1972) published an article called "Can a mechanical chess-player outplay its designer?" At the time, the question was not only of philosophic interest, but was fast approaching practical importance. Ashby felt compelled to demonstrate the full significance and implications of this possibility to an audience beyond the handful of psychiatrists and cyberneticians with whom he had contact. To do this, he developed a clear and compelling problem through which audiences could grasp this significance. Ashby was concerned with the ability of a machine, in this case a chess-playing machine, to acquire knowledge and skill beyond the knowledge and skill built into it. (source: British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, May 1952, Vol. 3, No. 9, pp. 44-57)

In February 1953, Eliot Slater (1904-1983) published an article called "Statistics for the Chess Computer and the Factor of Mobility." Claude Shannon argued that the problem of providing a program for a chess-playing computer is of theoretical interest, and its use might lead to a wide range of practical developments. The problem was also interesting psychologically. If the human and the mechanical players are to play the same game, they will each have to be directed by concepts which have a certain equivalence. But the concepts used by the skilled human chess-player are both subtle and complex, and for the purpose of programming a computer they will have to be reduced to their simplest form. Chess-masters are, as a class, men of considerable general intellectual ability, and come from the ranks of professional men, mathematicians, scientists, lawyers, etc. They have in addition a special ability. Very few chess-masters, who began the game early, did not show unusual excellence at it at a very early age. The specific chess ability begins to show itself, given the opportunity, at about the age of eleven. Furthermore, there are few, if any, chess-masters who cannot play blindfold, and play many games at once, achievements which are entirely beyond the powers of the ordinary player. The order of intellectual activity which we are required to reduce to simple terms is therefore of a superior kind. (source: Transactions of the IRE Professional Group on Information Theory, Vol 1, # 1, Feb 1953)

In 1953, Alan Turing included an example of his chess program in action in chapter 25 ("Digital Computers Applied to Games") of the book Faster Than Thought by B. Bowden. He discussed how a digital computer could play chess. (source: Faster Than Thought, Bowden, 1953, pp. 288-310)

In 1954, Norwegian-Italian mathematician Nils Barricelli (1912-1993) visited Princeton and met grandmaster Reuben Fine (1914-1993). In a discussion with Fine, Barricelli said that he was going to program a computer to beat Reuben Fine. At chess. Fine replied that he was sure that such a machine would play a poor game. Barricelli eventually developed his chess program called FREEDOM, which took place in the First World Computer Chess Championship in Stockholm in 1974. (source: Bell, MASTER at IFIPS, Atlas Computer Laboratory, 1978)

In March 1955, Allen Newell (1927-1992), of the RAND Corporation, published an article called "The Chess Machine: An Example of Dealing with a Complex Task of Adaptation." The modern general-purpose computer was characterized as the embodiment of a three-point philosophy: (1) There shall exist a way of computing anything computable; (2) The computer shall be so fast that it does not matter how complicated the way is; and (3) Man shall be so intelligent that he will be able to discern the way and instruct the computer. (source: Proceedings of AFIPS Western Joint Computer Conference, pp. 101-108, March 1955)

In 1955, John McCarthy (1927-2011) invented the alpha-beta search function that was eventually used in chess programs. In 1955, he coined the word Artificial Intelligence and is considered the father of artificial intelligence. It was McCarthy's students that developed the first computer program to convincingly play chess. It ran initially on an IBM 704 computer (later on an IBM 709 and 7090) and incorporated McCarthy's version of an alpha-beta pruning scheme to reduce the number of positions that had to be considered. The IBM 704 was one of the last vacuum tube computers.

In 1955, Cliff Shaw (1922-1991) of the RAND Corporation worked with Allen Newell and Herbert Simon at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) in Pittsburgh to develop their CP-1 chess program later called NSS (Newell, Shaw, and Simon). The later abandoned the project to focus on writing programs for discovering symbolic logic proofs. They returned to the NSS chess program in 1958 using a more powerful computer.

In 1956, Russian programmers began developing a chess-playing computer program that ran on their BESM-6 Soviet mainframe computer. By 1958, a computer program was completed to play a complete game of chess using a BESM.

By 1956 experiments on a Univac MANIAC I (Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer) computer (capable of 11,000 operations a second and used to design hydrogen bombs) at Los Alamos, using a 6x6 chessboard, was playing chess. This was the first documented account of a running chess program. It used a chess set without bishops. It took 12 minutes to search 4 moves deep. Adding the two bishops would have taken 3 hours to search 4 moves deep. MANIAC I had a memory of 600 words, storage of 80K, 11KHz speed, and had 2,400 vacuum tubes. The team that programmed MANIAC was led by Stan Ulam (1909-1984), who invented nuclear pulse propulsion and designed the H-bomb with Edward Teller (1908-2003). (source: Journal of the ACM, Vol. 4, # 174, 1956)

Playing with the simplified Los Alamos rules, the program played three games. The first game pitted the program against itself. In the second game, the program played Dr. Martin Kruskel, a mathematician and strong chess player. The human won. In the third game, the program mated a novice in 23 moves. It was the first time a human had lost to a computer in a game of intellectual skill. The novice was a secretary who had been taught the game during the previous week. She had been coached explicitly for the purpose of seeing how well the program could do against a beginner. (sources: Chess Review, Jan 1957, pp. 13-16 and Pritchard, The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants, 1994, pp. 175-176)

In April 1957, James Kister, Paul Stein, Stan Ulam, William Walden, and Mark Wells (all from Los Alamos Scientific Lab) published an article called "Experiments in Chess." The aim of the article was to report on some experiments performed on a fast computing machine, the MANIAC I, on the coding of computers to play the game of chess. It was not their belief that a machine would be made in the near future which could be coded to beat a strong player. It was the first published report of a chess-playing computer program. (source: Journal of the ACM, Vol. 4 # 2, April 1957, pp. 174-177)

In 1957, Alex Bernstein, an IBM employee, created the first complete chess program at IBM. With his colleagues Michael de V. Roberts, Timothy Arbuckle and Martin Belsky, Bernstein created a chess program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It ran on an IBM 704 (42,000 instructions per second), one of the last vacuum tube computers. It took about 8 minutes to make a move after a 4-ply search. Bernstein got support from chess advisor Arthur Bisguier (1929-2017), who became an IBM employee and an international grandmaster in 1957. International Master Edward Lasker (1885-1981) played the program, easily defeating it, but he commented that it played a ‘passable amateur game.' The Bernstein Chess Program was the prototype of a selective forward pruning technique called the Shannon Type B (selective search) program. His program searched four plies and considered seven most plausible moves from each position, evaluating material, mobility, area control and king defense. (source: Proceedings from the Western Computer Conference, Vol. 13, # 157, 1958)

In 1957, American economist, political scientist, artificial intelligence pioneer, and Nobel prize-winner Herbert Simon (1916-2001) and a team at Carnegie Tech said that "within 10 years, a digital computer would be the world's chess champion, unless the rules bar it from competition." (source: New Scientist, Aug 5, 1989, p. 50). It actually took 40 years before a computer could be the world chess champion in a match.

In 1957, the original chess program on the MANIAC I was lost when it was retired and replaced by MANIAC II. It may have played 20 games by Los Alamos rules before the program was lost. Chess wasn't the only game programmed on the MANIAC I. It was also programmed to play Blackjack.

In 1957, a few scientists and engineers predicted that "within 10 years a computer would be world chess champion." (source: Praxtime, Marc 24, 2014 - https://praxtime.com/2014/03/24/chess-t ... -progress/)

In 1958, Allen Newell (1927-1992), Herbert Simon and Cliff Shaw developed the chess program CP-1 (NSS) at Carnegie Tech. It was the first chess program to be written in a high-level language (IPL-IV) and took about an hour to make a move. Their NSS program combined algorithms that searched for good moves with heuristics that captured well-known chess strategies. Its most important innovation was the alpha-beta tree search algorithm. The way it works is that a computer evaluates a move and starts working on its second move. As soon as a single line shows that it will return a lower value than the first move, it can terminate the search. You can now chop off large parts of the search tree without affecting the final results. The NSS chess program ran on a JOHNNIAC (named after John von Neumann), an early computer built by RAND Corporation, first built in 1953. Newell and Shaw handled most of the actual development work.

In 1958, the NSS chess program beat a human player for the first time. The human player was a secretary who was taught how to play chess one hour before her game with the computer. The computer program was played on an IBM 704. The computer displayed a level of chess-playing expertise greater than an adult human could gain from one hour of chess instruction.

In June 1958, there was an article called "Computer v. Chess-Player" by Michael de V. Roberts and Alex Bernstein in Scientific American. It showed a picture of Alex Bernstein playing chess using an IBM 704 computer. Bernstein also presented an article on the chess playing program at a computer conference in 1958. (source: Scientific American, Jun 1, 1958, Vol. 198, # 6, pp. 96-105)

In October 1958, Allen Newell, John C. Shaw, and Herbert Simon published an article called "Chess-playing programs and the problem of complexity." This paper traced the development of digital computer programs that play chess. The work of Shannon, Turing, the Los Alamos group, Bernstein, and the authors was treated in turn. The efforts to program chess provided an indication of current progress in understanding and constructing complex and intelligent mechanisms. (source: IBM Journal of Research and Development, Vol 2 Issue 4, pp. 320-335, October 1958)

In 1959, MIT freshmen Alan Kotok (1942-2006), Elwyn Berlekamp (1940- ), Michael Lieberman, Charles Niessen, and Robert A. Wagner started working a chess-playing program while students of Professor John McCarthy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They started with Bernstein's program, then added alpha-beta pruning to minmax at McCarthy's suggestion to improve the plausible move generator. They wrote in Fortran, and a single move could take five to twenty minutes to complete. Their chess-playing program ran on an IBM 7090 mainframe computer.

In 1959, a Canadian chess program was demonstrated at the University of Toronto. It was written by International Master Frank Anderson (1928-1980) and Bob Cody, and it ran on an IBM 605 computer. The program did not play a complete game of chess, but analyzed simple pawn endings. The program was able to play these simple pawn endgames perfectly. When the program was demonstrated at the Canadian Conference of Scientists it played against more than 50 different opponents, each of whom was allowed to choose his own starting position, given the small number of pawns. In each case the program played perfectly. David Levy wrote, "The programmers devised a unique strategy that enabled their program to play these endings perfectly. Their first version could cope with more than 180,000 different positions, a figure that was increased in subsequent versions of the program. When the program was demonstrated at the Canadian Conference of Scientists it played against more than 50 different opponents, each of whom was allowed to choose his own starting position, given the small number of pawns. In each case the program played perfectly. Unfortunately, the strategy that enabled these endings to be programmed successfully was never documented and the programmers no longer have any written record of it, nor are they able to remember it. In fact, Frank Anderson confessed to me recently that even at the time he could not explain why some of their strategies worked."

In the 1950s, world chess champion Mikhail Botvinnik (1911-1995), who had a PhD in electrical engineering, became interested in computers that could play chess. Botvinnik's research on chess-playing programs concentrated on "selective searches", which used general chess principles to decide which moves were worth considering. This was the only feasible approach for the primitive computers available in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, which were only capable of searching three or four half-moves deep (i.e., A's move, B's move, A's move, B's move) if they tried to examine every variation.

In 1960, Mikhail Botvinnik gave a lecture at Humboldt University in Berlin called "Man and machines at the chessboard." He was convince that a computer could be programmed to play at grandmaster strength.

In 1961, a chess program was written at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Moscow under the direction of Mikhail Shura-Bura (1918-2008) running on a Strela or M-20 single-processor computer. (source: Tomanov, "The Best Move in 58 Seconds," 8th Bulletin of the Botvinnik-Tal 1961 Revenge Match, 1961)

In 1961, John Maynard Smith (1920-2004) designed a chess move analyzer called SOMA (Smith One-Move analyzer). It used an evaluation function that took in account the material, mobility, and ‘swap-off values.'

In 1962, the first MIT chess program was written. It was the first chess program that played regular chess credibly. It was chiefly written by Alan Kotok (1941-2006) for his Bachelor of Science thesis project, assisted by John McCarthy of MIT. The program ran on an IBM 7090, looking at 1,100 positions per second. The program was able to beat chess beginners and played about 100 games. Kotok, at age 20, published their work in MIT Artificial Intelligence Memo 41 and his B.S. thesis. Kotok went on to become one of DEC's leading computer designers (chief architect of the PDP-10), and created the first video game and the gaming joystick. (source: Kotok, "A Chess Playing Program for the IBM 7090 Computer," MIT Department of Electrical Engineering, 1962)

In 1962, the first recorded computer chess cheating occurred at MIT. Some MIT students went to Professor John McCarthy and another professor (both chess players), stating that they had a breakthrough in chess algorithms and that they should come to the lab immediately to see their discovery. McCarthy was led into one lab room and the other professor was led into another lab room. One of the professors was placed in front in a TX-0 computer, and the other in front of a PDP-1 computer. They were then asked to enter chess moves. Unknown to them, their computers were connected to each other by a single wire and the two professors were playing each other.

In 1963, on a Moscow television show, Yuri Averbakh (1922- ) predicted a world chess champion computer by 1998. David Bronstein (1924-2006) predicted that there would be separated chess championship for man and machines by 2000. Vasily Smyslov (1921-2010) predicted that a chess computer would never be world chess champion. (source: British Chess Magazine, April 1963, pp. 117-118)

In 1963, world chess champion Mikhail Botvinnik predicted that a Russian chess playing program would eventually defeat the World Champion. Botvinnik eventually developed an algorithm that was reasonably good at finding the right move in difficult positions, but it often missed the right move in simple positions, e.g., where it was possible to checkmate in two moves. This "selective" approach turned out to be a dead end, as computers were powerful enough by the mid-1970s to perform a brute-force search (checking all possible moves) several moves deep and today's vastly more powerful computers do this well enough to compete against human world champions. However, his PIONEER program contained a generalized method of decision-making that, with a few adjustments, enabled it to plan maintenance of power stations all over the USSR.

In 1963, Grandmaster David Bronstein (1924-2006) defeated an M-20 Soviet mainframe computer running an early Soviet chess program at the Moscow Mathematics Institute. He played two chess games with the computer and easily won them both. The games are the oldest known games between a Grandmaster and a computer.

In 1963, Alexander Brudno (1918-2009) independently discovered the alpha-beta algorithm. The algorithm was implemented in the ITEP Chess Program. He later led the team that created the chess program KAISSA at Moscow's Institute of Control Sciences.

In 1963, the ITEP Chess Program, a forerunner of the Soviet Kaissa program, was developed at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP). It was developed by by Vladimir Arlazarov, Alexander Bittman (Russian national chess master), Anatoly Uskov, Alexander Zhivotovsky,. It ran on their M-2 computer (used for rocket design and nuclear physics) and was also ported to run on the M-20. The ITEP Program was called a Shannon Type A program using a general recursive search engine developed by Alexander Kronrod (1921-1986). Kronrod is well known for saying, "chess is the Drosophila [fruit fly] of artificial intelligence." Georgy Adelson-Velsky (1922-2014) headed the development of the computer chess program at ITEP. His innovations included the first use of bitboards (a now-common method for representing game positions) in computer chess. (Genetics research was enhanced by Thomas Morgan's use of the Drosophila, or fruit fly, for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1933)

In 1964, Chess Life had an article called "Applications of Chess Computers." (source: Chess Life, Jan 1964, p. 14)

In February 1965, Richard Bellman (1920-1984), of the RAND Corporation, published an article called "On the application of dynamic programming to the determination of optimal play in chess and checkers." A great deal of effort was expended about the use of digital computers to play chess or checkers. The paper tried to show how the theory of dynamic programming could be used to determine optimal play in the great majority of pawn-king end games in chess, with computers currently available, and to determine the optimal play for the entire game of checkers. He proposed the creation of a database to solve chess endgames using retrograde analysis. Instead of analyzing forward from the position currently on the board, the database would analyze backward from positions where one player is checkmated or stalemated. (source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Feb 1965, Vol. 53, # 2, pp. 244-247)

In May 1965, Claude Shannon met Mikhail Botvinnik in Moscow and discussed computers and chess. Shannon challenged Botvinnik to a game of chess. Botvinnik won in 42 moves.

In 1965, John McCarthy, who was a professor at Stanford University since 1962, visited the Soviet Union. There, a group at the Moscow Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP), led by Alexander Kronrod, challenged his chess program (Kotok-McCarthy program) to a match with their chess program, later called KAISSA. A match was held over nine months in 1966-67. The Soviet program won the match 3-1 (two wins and two draws). The Kotok-McCarthy program ran on an IBM 7090 computer. The Soviet chess program ran on an M-20 computer. Former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik was an advisor for the Soviet chess program. After the match, Konrod lost his directorship at ITEP and his professorship because of complaints from the physics users that ITEP resources were being wasted on chess. ITEP's programming team was led by Georgy Adelson-Velsky.

In 1965, Dr. Hubert Dreyfus (1929-2017), a professor of philosophy at MIT, later at Berkeley, was hired by RAND Corporation to explore the issue of artificial intelligence. He wrote a 90-page paper called "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence" (later expanded into the book What Computers Can't Do) questioning the computer's ability to serve as a model for the human brain. He also asserted that no computer program could defeat even a 10-year-old child at chess.

In early 1966, an IBM 7090 computer programmed by Dr. John McCarthy at Stanford University in Palo Alto began a chess game with a computer programmed by a team at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. The Stanford computer won the match. (source: Chess Review, Jan 1967, p. 31).

In April 1966, George Baylor and Herbert Simon published a paper called "A Chess Mating Combinations Program." The chess program, MATER, written in Fortran, reported in this paper was not a complete chess player; it did not play chess games. Rather, it was a chess analyst limited to searching for checkmating combinations in positions containing tactical possibilities. A combination in chess is a series of forcing moves with sacrifice that ends with an objective advantage for the active side. A checkmating combination, then, is a combination in which that objective advantage is check-mate. Thus, the MATER program described in this paper, given a position, proceeded by generating that class of forcing moves that put the enemy King in check or threaten mate in one move, and then by analyzing first those moves that appear most promising. (source: Proceedings of AFIPS Joint Computer Conference, Vol. 28, April 1966, pp. 431-447)

In September 1966, there was a Scientific American article called "System Analysis and Programming" by Christopher Strachey (1916-1975). It discussed how positions on a chess board could be represented by a computer. This article was about how to get a computer to do what you want, and why it almost always takes longer than you expect. It was not a detailed report on the state of the art of programming but an attempt to show how to set about writing a program. The process of writing a program was primarily intuitive rather than formal. The author was more concerned with the guiding principles that underlie programming than with the particular language in which the program was to be presented to the machine. (source: Scientific American, Vol. 24, #3, Sep 1, 1966, pp. 112-124)

In November 1966, Richard Greenblatt (1944- ), with assistance from Donald Eastlake at MIT and Stephen Crocker, began writing a chess program called MacHack VI. It is sometimes known as the Greenblatt Chess Program or Mac Hack VI. Technical advice in the programming was given by Larry Kaufman (1947- ), Alan Baisley, and Robert A. Wagner. They were all highly rated chess players and MIT students. MacHack VI was the first chess program (a Shannon type B program) to play in human tournaments. It was also the first to be granted a chess rating, and the first to draw and win against a person in tournament play. The name came from Project MAC (Multilevel Access Computer or Machine-Aided Cognition), which was a research project located at MIT. The number VI refered to the DEC PDP-6 (200KHz) machine for which it was written. DEC built the $400,000 PDP-6, built of discrete silicon transistors, and gave the first prototype to Project MAC. The PDP-6 had a speed of about 225,000 instructions per second. Greenblatt was very interested in artificial intelligence (AI). He decided to use the computer operating system to actually do something in AI. He had seen Kotok's chess playing program and knew it was bad. Since he was also a chess player, it was only logical that he worked on a chess program that would go beyond Kotok's chess programming effort, as well as other AI chess projects that had been attempted at various labs around the country.

Greenblatt wrote the program after reading an MIT Artificial Intelligence memo on the limitation of computer chess. He said he intended to write a chess-playing program good enough to beat a human. Greenblatt's thesis adviser, Marvin Minksy (1927-2016), tried to discourage Greenblatt, telling him that there was little home of making progress in chess-playing software. Greenblatt managed to get four hours of PDP-6 time a day, then wrote code off-line when he wasn't on the machine. The research program was also supported by the Advanced Research Project Agency (AROA), under Office of Naval Research Contract Number Nonr-4102(01).

Greenblatt added 50 heuristics (rules of thumb for making a move) to an older chess program written by Kotok. MacHack VI was written in MIDAS macro assembly language on the DEC PDP-6 computer that DEC donated to MIT. Greenblatt wrote the chess program using only 16K of memory for the PDP-6 computer. It evaluated about 10 positions per second.

MacHack was the first computer program to implement a transposition table and an opening ‘book.' This innovation let the computer take advantage of the fact that about 25% of all move sequences transpose to the same end position. Greenblatt was able to get his program playing chess in one week. The program was debugged and given features over the next few months. It used a plausible move generator to restrict the number of moves examined at each ply. It examined 15 moves at ply one, 15 at ply two, 9 at ply three, and 9 at ply four. In order to search to a five-ply depth, the program had to deal with a game tree of 127,575 moves.

Greenblatt was offered a B.S. degree from MIT if he would write a thesis about his chess program. He never did write his thesis. Greenblatt later founded Lisp Machine, Inc., and is considered one of the founders of the hacker community.

On November 20, 1966 a USSR chess program, programmed by scientists of the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) began a 4-game correspondence match with the Kotok-McCarthy MIT chess program at Stanford University. The match lasted 9 months and was won by the Soviet computer, with 3 wins and 1 loss. (sources: Soviet Sport, Mar 12, 1967, and Chess Life, May 1967, p. 112)

From January 21-23, 1967, MacHack VI (DEC PDP-6), entered as "Robert Q. Computer," played in the Massachusetts Winter Amateur Championship at the Young Men's Christian Union (YMCU) in Boston. It was the first time a computer played chess against human beings under regular tournament conditions. MacHack VI played all five rounds and ended up with a score of 0.5-4.5, one draw (against J. Conroy, rated 1412) and four losses for a U.S. Chess Federation (USCF) provisional rating of 1243. It took 32nd place out of 35. The program pulled off some nice combinations, but was weak in the endgame. After the tournament, MacHack VI's provisional rating was 1239. (sources: Chess Life, Feb 1967, p, 23, Chess Review, Mar 1967, p. 68, and Boston Globe, Jan 29, 1967). The first tournament game by a computer was played between Carl Wagner (2190) and MacHack VI in round 1. The computer, at MIT in Cambridge, MA, was operated by Allen Moulton and William Gosper. The moves were relayed to the computer by teletype. Carl Wagner (1940- ) won the event, directed by Ben Landey. (source: "MIT Computer Loses to Human in Chess," The Lewiston Daily Sun, Jan 23, 1967)

Carl Wagner - MacHack VI, Boston (1), 1967 1.g3 e5 2.Nf3 e4 3.Nd4 Bc5 4.Nb3 Bb6 5.Bg2 Nf6 6.c4 d6 7.Nc3 Be6 [7...Nc6] 8.d3 [8.Nxe4] 8...exd3 9.Bxb7 Nbd7?! [9...dxe2 10.Qxe2 Nbd7] 10.exd3 Rb8 11.Bg2 0-0 [11...Bg4] 12.0-0 Bg4 [12...Ne5] 13.Qc2 Re8 [13...Bf5] 14.d4 c5 15.Be3 cxd4 [15...Rc8] 16.Nxd4 Ne5 17.h3?! [17.b3] 17...Bd7 [17...Bxh3 18.Bxh3 Bxd4 19.Bxd4 Nf3+ 20.Kg2 Nxd4] 18.b3 Bc5 [18...Bxh3 19.Bxh3 Bxd4 20.Bxd4 Nf3+ 21.Kg2 Nxd4] 19.Rad1 Qc8 [19...Qb6] 20.Kh2 [20.Bg5 Bxh3 21.Bxf6 gxf6 22.Nd5] 20...Ng6 [20...h6] 21.Bg5 [21.Ndb5] 21...Re5 [21...Nh5] 22.Bxf6 gxf6 23.Ne4 f5?? [23...Kg7] 24.Nf6+ Kg7 25.Nxd7 Qxd7 26.Nc6 Rbe8 27.Nxe5 Rxe5 28.Qc3 f6 29.Rd3 [29.b4] 29...Re2 30.Rd2 Rxd2 31.Qxd2 Ne5 32.Rd1 [32.b4] 32...Qc7 33.Bd5 [33.f4] 33...Kg6 34.b4 Bb6 35.Qc2 Nc6 36.Be6 Nd4 37.Rxd4 Bxd4 38.Qxf5+ Kg7 39.Qg4+ Kh6 [39...Kf8 40.Qg8+ Ke7 41.Qf7+ Kd8 42.Qf8#] 40.Qxd4 Qe7 41.Qh4+ Kg6 42.Bf5+ Kg7 43.Qxh7+ Kf8 44.Qh8+ Kf7 45.Qa8 [45.h4] 45...Qc7 46.Qd5+ Kg7 47.Kg2 Qe7 48.h4 Kh6 49.g4 [49.Qg8] 49...Kg7 50.h5 Qe2 51.h6+ Kf8 [51...Kxh6 52.Qg8 Qe8 53.Qh7+ Kg5 54.f4+ Kxf4 55.Qh6+ Ke5 56.Qe3#] 52.h7 Qxf2+ 53.Kxf2 Ke7 54.h8Q a6 55.Qe6# 1-0

J. Conroy (1410) - MacHack VI, Boston (3), 1967 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Nf6 4.Ng5 d5 5.exd5 Na5 6.Bb5+ c6 7.dxc6 bxc6 8.Qf3 Qd5 9.Qxd5 [9.Be2] 9...Nxd5 10.Be2 [10.Ba4] 10...Bf5 [10...Be7] 11.d3 Bb4+ [11...Be7] 12.Bd2 Bxd2+ [12...Ke7] 13.Nxd2 0-0 [13...h6] 14.a3 [14.Nb3] 14...f6 [14...Rab8] 15.Ngf3 [15.Nge4] 15...Rab8 [15...Rad8] 16.b4 Nb7 17.0-0 [17.d4] 17...Nc3 [17...Nd6] 18.Rfe1 Nxe2+ [18...Nd6] 19.Rxe2 Nd6 20.Ne4 [20.d4] 20...Nxe4 [20...Bxe4 21.dxe4 a5] 21.dxe4 Be6 22.Rd1 [22.Rd2] 22...Bc4 [22...Rfc8] 23.Red2 [23.Ree1] 23...Rb7 [23...a5] 24.Rd8 [24.Nh4] 24...Rxd8? [24...a5] 25.Rxd8+ Kf7 26.Nh4 [26.h3] 26...g5? [26...Be6] 27.Nf5 Rc7 28.g4 [28.Rh8] 28...Kg6 [28...c5] 29.Rd6 [29.f3] 29...Be2 [29...c5] 30.Rd8?! [30.h3] 30...Bxg4 31.Rg8+ [31.Nd6] 31...Kh5 32.Ng7+ [32.Ng3+ Kh6 33.Kg2] 32...Kh6 [32...Kh4] 33.Nf5+ [33.Ne8] 33...Kh5 34.Ng7+ [34.Rf8] 34...Kh6 [34...Kh4] ˝-˝

In 1967, several MIT students and professors, organized by Seymour Papert (1928-2016), challenged Dr. Hubert Dreyfus (1929-2017) to play a game of chess against MacHack VI. Dreyfus accepted. Herbert Simon, an AI pioneer, watched the match. He said "It was a wonderful game - a real cliffhanger between two woodpushers with bursts of insights and fiendish plans…great moments of drama and disaster that go in such games." Dreyfus was being beaten by the computer when he found a move which could have captured the enemy queen. The only way the computer could get out of this was to keep Dreyfus in checks with his own queen until he could fork the queen and king, then exchange them. And that's what the computer did. Soon, Dreyfus was losing. Finally, the computer checkmated Dreyfus in the middle of the board.

Hubert Dreyfus - MacHack VI, Boston, 1967 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Nf6 4.Nc3 Bc5 5.d3 0-0 6.Ng5 Na5 7.Bd5? [7.Bb3] 7...c6 8.Bb3 Nxb3 [8...d5] 9.cxb3 [9.axb3] 9...h6 10.Nh3? [10.Nf3] 10...d5 11.exd5?? [11.Qf3] 11...Bg4 12.f3 Bxh3 13.gxh3 Nxd5 14.Nxd5 Qxd5 [14...Qh4+! 15.Kd2 cxd5] 15.Bd2 [15.Qe2] 15...Qxd3 [15...Qd4] 16.b4?? [16.Qe2] 16...Be7 [16...Bd4] 17.Rg1?? [17.Qe2] 17...e4 [17...Bh4+! 18.Rg3 Qd7] 18.fxe4? [18.Qe2] 18...Bh4+ 19.Rg3 Bxg3+ 20.hxg3 Qxg3+ 21.Ke2 Qxh3 [21...Rad8] 22.Qg1 h5 23.Bc3 g6 24.Qf2 h4 [24...Rfe8!] 25.Qf6 Qg4+ 26.Kd2?? [26.Kf1] 26...Rad8+ [26...Rfd8+! 27.Ke3 Qg3+] 27.Kc2?? [27.Ke3] 27...Qxe4+ 28.Kb3 Qe6+ 29.Qxe6 fxe6 30.Rh1 Rf4 31.Be1 Rf3+ 32.Ka4 h3 33.b5 Rd4+ 34.b4 cxb5+ 35.Kxb5 Ra3 [35...Rd5+ 36.Ka4 b5+ 37.Ka5 Ra3#] 36.Kc5 Rd5+ 37.Kc4 b5# 0-1

In February 1967, MacHack VI (the Greenblatt chess program) played in a local chess tournament in Boston.

In March 1967, MacHack VI (the Greenblatt chess program) played in a local chess tournament in Boston. It won one game and lost 4 games, for a provisional rating of 1330 and an established rating of 1360. MacHack VI won about 80% of its games against non-tournament players.

MacHack VI - Ben Landey (1435), Boston (3), 1967 1.e4 c5 2.d4 cxd4 3.Qxd4 Nc6 4.Qd3 [4.Qa4] 4...Nf6 5.Nc3 g6 [5...Nb4] 6.Nf3 d6 [6...Bg7] 7.Bf4 [7.Be2] 7...e5 [7...Bg7] 8.Bg3 [8.Bg5] 8...a6 [8...Be7] 9.0-0-0 b5 [9...Be7] 10.a4 [10.Bh4] 10...Bh6+? [10...Be6] 11.Kb1 b4 12.Qxd6 Bd7?? [12...Qxd6] 13.Bh4 [13.Bxe5] 13...Bg7 14.Nd5 Nxe4 15.Nc7+ Qxc7 16.Qxc7 Nc5 17.Qd6 Bf8 18.Qd5 Rc8 19.Nxe5 Be6 20.Qxc6+ Rxc6 21.Rd8# 1-0

In March 1967, the Atlas chess program was written in Algol by Alex Bell at Atlas Computer Laboratory in Chilton, England.

On March 10, 1967, a USSR chess program (ITEP) beat the Kotok-McCarthy MIT chess program from Stanford University in their third game, checkmating in 19 moves. The match lasted 9 months and was won by the Soviet computer, with 3 wins and 1 loss. (sources: Soviet Sport, Mar 12, 1967, and Chess Life, May 1967, p. 112, and Chess Review, June 1967, p. 187)

USSR Program (Kaissa) - USA Program (Stanford), March 10, 1967, game 3, 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Nc3 Bc5 4.Nxe5 Nxe5 5.d4 Bd6 6.dxe5 Bxe5 7.f4 Bxc3+ 8.bxc3 Nf6 9.e5 Ne4 10.Qd3 Nc5 11.Qd5 Ne6?! (11…d6) 12.f5 Ng5? 13.h4 f6 14.hxg5 fxg5 15.Rxh7! Rf8 (15…Rxh7 16.Qg8+) 16.Rxg7 c6 17.Qd6 Rxf5 18.Rg8+ Rf8 19.Qxf8 mate 1-0

On April 22, 1967, MacHack VI played in the Boston Spring Amateur championship. MacHack VI forfeited its first round game. Machack VI then won two games and drew two games, for a provisional rating of 1450 and a performance rating of 1640. It won the class D trophy. The improvement in the program was due to additional programming and debugging, not learning. MacHack VI was strong in the opening and middle game, but its endgame was very weak. The weak endgame was due to its center-controlled heuristic interfered with the advancing passed pawns. (source: Chess Life, Aug 1967, p. 237)

MacHack VI - NN, Boston (2), 1967 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Bxc6 dxc6 5.0-0 Bd6 [5...Qd6] 6.d4 Bg4 7.dxe5 Bxf3 8.Qxf3 Bxe5 9.c3 [9.Qb3] 9...Qh4 [9...Nf6] 10.g3 Qe7 11.Re1 [11.Nd2] 11...h5 [11...Nf6] 12.h4 [12.Nd2] 12...0-0-0 13.Bg5 f6 14.Bf4 [14.Be3] 14...g5 [14...Bxf4 15.Qxf4 g5] 15.Bxe5 Qxe5 16.hxg5 fxg5 [16...Qxg5] 17.Qf5+? [17.Na3] 17...Qxf5 18.exf5 Nf6 19.c4 [19.Na3] 19...h4 [19...Ng4] 20.Nc3 Rd2 21.b3? [21.Re2] 21...h3 [21...hxg3! 22.fxg3 Rhh2] 22.Ne4 [22.Rad1] 22...Nxe4 [22...h2+! 23.Kh1 Nxe4 24.Rxe4 Rxf2] 23.Rxe4 Kd7 24.f6 [24.a4] 24...Rd6 [24...h2+ 25.Kg2 Rf8] 25.f7 [25.f4] 25...Rf6?? [25...Rf8] 26.Rd1+ Rd6 27.Rxd6+? [27.Rde1!] 27...cxd6 28.Kh2 Rf8 29.Kxh3 Rxf7 30.Re2 b5 31.Kg4 Rg7 32.Re4 d5 [32...Rf7] 33.cxd5 cxd5 34.Re5 Kd6 35.Rxg5 Rxg5+?? [35...Re7] 36.Kxg5 Ke5 37.f4+ Ke4 38.f5 d4 39.f6 d3 40.f7 d2 41.f8Q d1Q 42.Qf5+ Ke3 43.Qe6+? [43.Qf4+! Kd3 (43...Ke2 44.Qg4+) 44.Qd6+] 43...Kf2 44.Qxa6?! [44.g4!] 44...Qd5+ [44...Kxg3] 45.Kf4 [45.Kf6] 45...Qd4+ 46.Kf5 Qd5+ 47.Kg4 [47.Kf6] 47...Qf3+ 48.Kh4 Qxg3+ [48...Qh1+] 49.Kh5 Qe5+ 50.Kh6 Qh8+ 1/2-1/2

On April 20, 1967, Dr. L. Stephen Coles, while affiliated with Carnegie Tech, lost a game of chess from MacHack VI, which was hosted on a PDP-10.

In May 1967, MacHack VI (the Greenblatt chess program) played in a local chess tournament in Boston. It lost 4 games, winning none and drawing none. Its provisional rating was 1400.

In September 1967, MacHack VI had a USCF rating of 1493 provisional rating, based on 18 rated games it had played. (source: Chess Life, Sep 1967, p. 284)

In November 1967, Richard D. Greenblatt, Donald E. Eastlake, and Stephen D. Crocker published a paper called "The Greenblatt Chess Program." Since mid-November 1966 a chess program was under development at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of Project MAC at M.I.T. This paper described the state of the program as of August 1967 and gave some of the details of the heuristics and algorithms employed. (source: Proceedings of the AFIPS Computer Conference, pp. 801-810, November 1967)

In 1967 MacHack VI was made an honorary member of the US Chess Federation (USCF) and the Massachusetts Chess Association (MACA). The MACHACK program was the first widely distributed chess program, running on many of the PDP machines. It was also the first to have an opening chess book programmed with it.

In late 1967, Gary Boos and James Munkstock, both from the University of Minnesota, started working on their chess program called Mr. Turk. It was written in Fortran and ran on a CDC 6600.

By the end of 1967, MacHack VI had played in four chess tournaments. It won 3 games, lost 12, and drew 3 (18 USCF-rated games total). In December 1967, MacHack VI had a provisional rating of 1493 by the U.S. Chess Federation. (source: Chess Life, Dec 1967, p. 394) By the end of 1967, it had played over 300 games in over-the-board competition with human players.

In 1968, Barbara Jane Huberman Liskov (1939- ) wrote a Ph.D. thesis (A Program to Play Chess End Games) at Stanford University that included a computer program that played certain chess endgames with pieces versus a lone king. This included endgames of King vs Queen, King vs Rook, King vs 2 Bishops, and King vs Bishop and Knight.

In 1968, I. Jack Good (1916-2009) wrote a paper called "Five-Year Plan for Automatic Chess." (source: Machine Intelligence, Vol. 2, 1968, pp. 110-115)

In April 1968, F. L. Moullen wrote an article called "Chess and the Computer." (source: Datamation, Vol. 14, # 4, April 1968, pp. 52-68).

In the spring of 1968, undergraduates Larry Atkin and Keith Gorlen decided to write a chess program to exercise Northwestern University's (Evanston, Illinois) new CDC 6400 mainframe computer (a slower and cheaper version of the CDC 6600 supercomputer, the world's fastest computer at the time — 3 million instructions per second). Atkin and Gorlen launched Chess 1.0 in their spare time.

In July 1968, former world chess champion Mikhail Botvinnik wrote an article called, "A Computer World Champion?" Botvinnik was interviewed by Dimitrije Bjelica. The article stated that Botvinnik was probably the greatest expert in computer chess. Botvinnik was sure that very soon, computers would be able to defeat Grandmasters, and later, become world champion. He said, "When computers start playing chess well, interest in chess will increase. When the computers start playing successfully, the Grandmasters' reputation s will be enhanced." (source: Chess Life, July 1968. pp. 271-272)

In August 1968 International Master David Levy (1945- ) made a $2,500 bet that no chess computer would beat him in 10 years. He won his bet. The original bet was with John McCarthy, a distinguished researcher in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford. The bet was made at the 1968 Machine Intelligence Workshop at the 4th IFIP conference in Edinburgh University. It was made after hearing artificial intelligence (AI) researchers John McCarthy and Donald Michie predicted that a computer would defeat the world chess champion within ten years. The bet was eventually made against four computer science professors, which Levy won. He finally lost to Deep Thought in 1989, 21 years after his bet. During the conference, MacHack VI, running on a PDP-10, won an exhibition match versus a chess program written by John Scott, running on a ICL 1909/5. MacHack VI won. (source: Machine Intelligence, Vol. 4, 1969).

On October 27, 1968, MacHack VI played its first game with another computer, called CHARLY, located at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. The computer played three games (games 2 and 3 played on Nov 16, 1968) via ham radio. All three games were won by MacHack VI. (source: Krakauer, "Computer Chess via Ham Radio," - http://ljkrakauer.com/LJK/60s/hamchess.htm)

CHARLY - MacHack VI, MIT v ETH computer radio match Zurich - Cambridge, MA, 1968 (1) 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.d4 Nxe4 4.Bd3 d5 5.Nxe5 Bd6 6.0—0 0—0 7.c4 Bxe5 8.dxe5 Nc6 9.cxd5 [9.Bf4] 9...Qxd5 10.Qf3 Bf5 11.Qxf5 [11.Nc3] 11...Qxd3 12.Nc3 Nc5 13.Qxd3 Nxd3 14.f4 Rfd8 15.Rf3 Rd7 16.Ne4 Rad8 17.b3 Rd4 18.Nc3 Ne1 19.Rg3 Nc2 20.Rb1 Kf8 21.Nb5? [21.a3] 21...Rd1+ 22.Kf2 R8d7?! [22...N6b4] 23.Ke2? [23.Nc3] 23...R1d5 [23...Rh1] 24.a4?! [24.Nc3] 24...N6d4+ [24...N6b4] 25.Nxd4 Nxd4+ 26.Kf2 Nf5 [26...Ne6] 27.Ba3+?! [27.Rh3] 27...c5 28.Rc3 [28.Rh3] 28...Rd2+ 29.Kg1? [29.Ke1] 29...b6 30.g4? [30.b4] 30...Nd4 31.Kh1 Nc2 [31...Rf2] 32.Bc1?? [32.Bb2] 32...Re2 33.Bb2 Ne3 34.h3 Rd1+ [34...Rdd2] 35.Rxd1 Nxd1 36.Ba1 Nxc3 37.Bxc3 Rc2 38.Be1 Rc1 39.g5 Rxe1+ 40.Kg2 Re4 41.b4 cxb4 0—1

At the end of 1968, MacHack Vi was USCF rated 1529.

In 1969, upon hearing of the work of Atkin and Gorlen, physics graduate student David Slate (rated around 2050) decided to write a competing program. They combined their programs in October 1969, and produced Chess 2.0.

By 1969, MacHack VI played in 18 chess tournaments and had played over 100 completed games.

In 1969, work began on the CHAOS (Chess Heuristics And Other Stuff) chess program at the RCA Systems Programming division in Cinnaminson, New Jersey.

In 1969, James Gillogly, while at the RAND Corporation, wrote a chess program in standard FORTRAN IV which utilized a standard alpha-beta lookahead search of selected portions of the move tree. The program played several complete games of chess. (source: "MAX: A Fortran Chess Player," RAND Corporation Paper, Vol. 4428, July 1970)

In August-September 1969, MacHack VI played in the Labor Day Open in Toronto.

Philip Haley (1772) — MacHack VI, Labor Day Open Toronto, Ontario (3), 1969 1.Nf3 Nf6 2.g3 d5 3.Bg2 c5 4.d3 Nc6 5.Bf4 Bf5 6.0—0 Qb6 7.Nc3 Qxb2 8.Qd2 [8.Bd2] 8...d4 9.Ne4 Nxe4 10.dxe4 Bxe4 11.Rfb1 Qc3 12.Qxc3 dxc3 13.Rxb7 Nb4 14.Rb8+? [14.Ng5] 14...Rxb8 15.Bxb8 Nxc2 16.Rc1 Nd4 [16...e6] 17.Nxd4 Bxg2 18.Nb5 [18.Kxg2] 18...Bh3 [18...Bc6] 19.Bxa7 Bd7 20.Nc7+ [20.a4] 20...Kd8 21.Nd5 c4?! [21...Bc6] 22.Nxc3 [22.Rxc3] 22...e5 23.Ne4 Bb5 24.Rb1 [24.Ng5] 24...Bc6 [24...Be8] 25.Nc3 [25.Ng5] 25...Bd7?! [25...Bd6] 26.a4 [26.Rb8+] 26...Bf5?! [26...Bd6] 27.e4 Bc8 [27...Be6] 28.a5 Ba6? [28...h5] 29.Rb6 Kc8?? [29...Bc8] 30.Nd5 [30.Rxa6] 30...f6?? [30...Bb7] 31.Rc6+ Kd7 32.Rxa6 Kc8 33.Rb6 Kd7 34.Rb8 Kc6 35.Be3 c3 36.Nxc3 [36.a6] 36...Kc7 37.Re8 Kd7 38.a6 Kxe8 39.a7 Kd7 40.a8Q Ke7 41.Qb7+ [41.Qd5 Ke8 42.Qe6+ Be7 43.Nd5 Kf8 44.Qxe7+ Kg8 45.Qe8#] 41...Kd6 42.Nd5 [42.Nb5+ Ke6 43.Qd5+ Ke7 44.Bc5+ Ke8 45.Nc7#] 42...f5 43.Qc7+ [43.Nb6 Ke6 44.Qd7+ Kf6 45.Nd5+ Kg6 46.Qxf5#] 43...Ke6 44.Qc8+ Kf7 45.Qxf5+ Ke8 46.Qe6+ Kd8 47.Bb6# 1—0

In 1969, Hans Berliner (1929-2017) developed his first chess program at Carnegie-Mellon University called J. Biit. J Biit (Just Because It Is There). It was written in PL/I and ran on a DEC PDP-10 computer at Carnegie Mellon University. He also got it running on an IBM 360/91 mainframe computer at Columbia University. J. Biit was one of the first chess programs operated through a Graphical User Interface (GUI).

[Ajedrecista]

Hello Vincent:

I could not pass up the chance to comment on 'El Ajedrecista', which is the very first mention of the timeline and I share my nickname with this machine.

The late Steven Edwards started a topic on the centennial of 'El Ajedrecista', which I completed with a two-page article of a Spanish newspaper from 1953. There are some photographs and an explanation about how it works in the Torres Quevedo Museum web hosted at the CPW article. Just translating:

The chess automatons, of which the Museum keeps the two prototypes developed by their author, are electromechanical machines capable of responding to particular game situations (in both, the machine plays with the white king and rook, and the opponent with the black king). The theoretical basis on which automata rests is the principle of switching systems enunciated by Torres Quevedo himself. The movement of the white pieces is a function of the black piece; the base of the black king is conductive, when placed on any square it closes two circuits that move sliding paths (horizontal and vertical). White's king and rook positions are defined by their own pairs of sliders. When the black king moves one position, the corresponding sliders are activated; through a system of contacts, the white pieces occupy the squares marked by the game strategy. The white pieces carry small steel balls, moved by electromagnets (located under the board) that are activated depending on the movement executed by the black king.

The first Ajedrecista was built around 1912 and presented in Paris two years later. The second prototype was designed in 1920.

First prototype of El Ajedrecista:


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

General view and detail of the second prototype of El Ajedrecista:

Regards from Spain.

Ajedrecista.

[dkappe]

After some biographical details of other persons, I was surprised that Shannon was only described as a researcher at Bell Labs.

Perhaps add that he was the father of Information Theory and the inventor of the digital computer (in his masters thesis no less: “A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits”).

[chrisw]

Interesting read, particularly on what’s in and what isn’t. Was it compiled with help of or by a web crawl? Anyway, my thoughts - there’s much detail, but very little big picture. Some of the defining dramatic moments in computer chess were just glossed over as just another detail, Deep Blue Kasparov for example. That the Rybka scandal practically destroyed computer chess, not touched on, nor that Vas and I took ICGA to their governing body and got ICGA convicted of Ethics violations during their “process”. The revolutionary effect of Stockfish open source development was again just a question of details. But the one paragraph that came across extremely odd is in part 3.
It begins: “in July 1993, an unrated black player …. World open Philadelphia … using headphones …. Disqualified … cheating … “

I didn’t notice any other named players being described as “unrated white player” or being identified in any unusual irrelevant way. It’s why I queried whether the compilation was automated or web crawled or performed by a human. Is the source material mentioning race, or did the compiler ensure the adjective was used?

[RubiChess]

Found it here: https://billwallchess.blogspot.com/2020 ... chess.html

So probably this white "retired senior scientist" Bill Wall is the one to blame.

[Vinvin]

Note there's also the chess pioneers page with a lot of names :
http://billwall.phpwebhosting.com/artic ... oneers.htm

And the main page is here : http://billwall.phpwebhosting.com/
With chess computer subjects :

Code: Select all

Computer Chess Pioneers
Computer Chess Timeline
Chess Engines and Computers
Chess Computer History
Early Chess Computers
1989 World Computer Championship, Edmonton
Computer Chess Rating Lists
Shredder Computer Chess
Adam's Computer Chess Pages
Schachcomputer.info
Computer chess books
Computer chess wiki
Computer History Museum - chess
Computers in correspondence chess
Franck Zibi Computer Chess Page
Chess problems of computers
Computer Games
Grandmasters vs. Computers
Computer Games
Computers AlphaZero vs. Stockfish 8
Pachman-Computer Chess
1976 US Computer Championship by Levy

[dkappe]

Note there's also the chess pioneers page with a lot of names :
http://billwall.phpwebhosting.com/artic ... oneers.htm

Yes, I see. From reading that page you wouldn’t know he was at or above the level of Turing. Computer Chess was a footnote to his prodigious career.