Author: Chris Hull
Date: 14:36:14 07/15/04
Go up one level in this thread
On July 15, 2004 at 09:48:05, Tony Petters wrote: >On July 15, 2004 at 07:39:05, TEERAPONG TOVIRAT wrote: > >> >>And.. Did he get any consolation prize? >> >>Thanks, >>Teerapong > >http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lab/7378/comphis.htm > >Computer Chess History by Bill Wall > >-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > >In 1945 Alan 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 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 1948 Turing challenged Donald Michie to see who could first write a simple >chess-playing algorithm. > >In March, 1949 Claude Shannon (1916-2001) described how to program a computer >and a Ferranti digital machine was programmed to solve mates in two moves. 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 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 rivalling 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 Shannon devised a chess playing program that appeared in the paper >"Programming a computer for playing chess" published in Philosophical Magazine, >Series 7, Vol. 41 (No. 314, March 1950). This was the first article on computer >chess. > >In November 1951, Dr. Dietrich Prinz wrote the original chess playing program >for the Manchester Ferranti computer. The program could solve simple mates in >two moves. > >In 1952 Alick Glennie, who wrote the first computer compiler, defeated Alan >Turing's chess program, TurboChamp. He was the first person to beat a computer >program at chess. Turing never finished his chess-playing program. > >In 1953 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. > >By 1956 experiments on a Univac 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. 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. > >In 1957 a chess program was written by Alex Bernstein at MIT for an IBM 704. It >could do 42,000 instructions per second and had a memory of 70 K. This was the >first full-fledged game of chess by a computer. It did a 4-ply search in 8 >minutes. > >In 1957 Herbert Simon said that within 10 years, a digital computer would be the >world's chess champion. > >In 1958 the alpha-beta pruning algorithm for chess was discovered by three >scientists at Carnegie-Mellon (Allen Newell, John Shaw, and Herbert Simon). Here >is how it works. A computer evaluates a move and starts working on its second >move. As soon a a single line shows that it will return a lower value than the >first move, it can terminate the search. You could now chop off large parts of >the search tree without affecting the final results. > >In 1958, a chess program (NSS) 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. > Of these first programs, which one played "real" chess - 8x8 board, castling, en passant. Some of the first program, played only a "simplified" chess. Chris
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