Author: John Wentworth
Date: 06:35:13 07/04/01
Did you know..... In 1947, Alan Turing specified the first chess program for chess. In 1948 the UNIVAC 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 Claude Shannon described how to program a computer and a Ferranti digital machine was programmed to solve mates in two moves. By 1956 experiments on a MANIAC I computer (11,000 operations a second) at Los Alamos, using a 6x6 chessboard, was playing chess. This was the first documented account of a running chess program. In 1957 a chess program was written by Bernstein for an IBM 704. This was the first full-fledged game of chess by a computer. The first chess computer to play in a tournament was MacHack VI (PDP-6) written at MIT by Greenblatt. The computer entered the 1966 Massachussets Amateur championship, scoring 1 draw and 4 losses for a USCF rating of 1243. In 1966 a USSR chess program defeated a Stanford IBM 7090 program. In 1967 MacHACK VI became the first program to beat a human (rate 1510), at the Massachussets State Championship. In 1968 International Master David Levy made a $3,000 bet that no chess computer would beat him in 10 years. He won his bet. In 1970 the first all-computer championship was held in New York and won by CHESS 3.0, a program written by Atkin and Gorlen at Northwestern University. Six programs had entered. In 1971 the Institute of Control Science, Moscow, created KAISSA using a British computer to play chess. In 1974 World Correspondence Champion Hans Berliner wrote his PhD dissertation on "Chess Computers as Problem Solving." In 1974 KAISSA won the world computer chess championship held in Stockholm with a perfect 4-0 score. In 1975 Grandmaster David Bronstein used the endgame database in KAISSA to win an adjourned game in a tournament in Vilnius. In 1976 CHESS 4.5 won the Class B section of the Paul Masson tournament in Northern California. The performance rating was 1950. In 1976 a computer program was used to make the chess pairings at the chess olympiad in Haifa. In 1977 the first microcomputer chess playing machine, CHESS CHALLENGER, was created. The International Computer Chess Association (ICCA) was formed. In 1977 CHESS 4.5 won the Minnesota Open winning 5 games and losing one. It had a performance rating of 2271. Stenberg (1969) became the first Class A player to lose to a computer. In 1977 SNEAKY PETE was the first chess computer to play in a U.S. Open, held in Columbus, Ohio. In 1977 Michael Stean became the first grandmaster to lose to a computer; it was a blitz game. In 1978 SARGON won the first tournament for microcomputers, held in San Jose. David Levy collected his 10 year bet by defeating CHESS 4.7 in Toronto. One of the games was a draw. This was the first time a computer drew an international master. In 1980 CHAMPION SENSORY CHALLENGER won the first world microcomputer championship, held in London. In 1981 CRAY BLITZ won the Mississipi State Championship with a perfect 5-0 score and a performance rating of 2258. In 1982 BELLE was confiscated by the State Department as it was heading to the Soviet Union to participate in a computer chess tournament. The State Department claimed it was a violation of a technology transfer law to ship a high technology computer to a foreign country. BELLE later played in the U.S. Oen speed championship and took 2nd place. By 1982 computer chess companies were topping $100 million in sales. In 1983 Belle became the first computer to beat a master in tournament play and the first computer to gain a master rating (2263). In 1983 the first microcomputer beat a master in tournament play. In 1984 a microcomputer won a tournament for the first time against mainframes, held in Canada. In 1985 HITECH achieved a performace rating of 2530. In 1987 the U.S. Amateur Championship became the first national championship to be directed by a computer program. In 1988 DEEP THOUGHT and Grandmaster Tony Miles shared first place in the U.S. Open championship. DEEP THOUGHT had a 2745 performance rating. In 1988 HITECH won the Pennsylvania State Chess Championship after defeating International Master Ed Formanek (2485). HITECH defeated Grandmaster Arnold Denker in a match. In 1988 Grandmaster Bent Larsen became the first GM to lose to a computer in a major tournament - the American Open. In 1989 DEEP THOUGHT won the world computer championship in Canada, with a rating of 2600. DEEP THOUGHT defeated Grandmaster Robert Byrne in a match game. DEEP THOUGHT can analyze 2 million positions a second. This year DEEP THOUGHT played a 2 game match (under tournament conditions) in New York against Garry Kasparov. Kasparov won the match 2-0. Afterwards he expressed surprise at the lack of strong oposition from the computer. In 1990 Former World Champion Anatoly Karpov lost to MEPHISTO in a simultaneous exhibition in Munich. MEPHISTO also beat grandmasters Robert Huebner and David Bronstein. MEPHISTO won the German blitz championship and earned an International Master norm by scoring 7-4 in the Dortmund Open. In 1994 WCHESS became the first computer to outperform grandmasters at the Harvard Cup in Boston. In 1994 Kasparov lost to FRITZ3 in Munich in a blitz tournament. The program also defeated Anand, Short, Gelfand, and Kramnik. Grandmaster Robert Huebner refused to play it and lost on forfeit, the first time a GM has forfeited to a computer. Although Kasparov lost to FRITZ3, he and FRITZ3 came equal first in the tournament. In a playoff to determine the winner, Kasparov beat FRITZ3, 3 games to 1. There where 17 grandmaster in the tournament. The highest rated computer in the world is DEEP BLUE, rated 2705.
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