Computer Chess - Chronology

Chronology

The idea of creating a chess-playing machine dates back to the eighteenth century. Around 1769, the chess playing automaton called The Turk became famous before being exposed as a hoax. Before the development of digital computing, serious trials based on automata such as El Ajedrecista of 1912, were too complex and limited to be useful for playing full games of chess. The field of mechanical chess research languished until the advent of the digital computer in the 1950s. Since then, chess enthusiasts and computer engineers have built, with increasing degrees of seriousness and success, chess-playing machines and computer programs.

• 1769, Wolfgang von Kempelen builds the Automaton Chess-Player, in what becomes one of the greatest hoaxes of its period.
• 1868, Charles Hooper presented the Ajeeb automaton — which also had a human chess player hidden inside.
• 1912, Leonardo Torres y Quevedo builds a machine that could play King and Rook versus King endgames.
• 1948, Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics describes how a chess program could be developed using a depth-limited minimax search with an evaluation function.
• 1950, Claude Shannon publishes "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess", one of the first papers on the problem of computer chess.
• 1951, Alan Turing develops on paper the first program capable of playing a full game of chess.
• 1952, Dietrich Prinz develops a program that solves chess problems.

• 1956, Los Alamos chess is the first program to play a chess-like game, developed by Paul Stein and Mark Wells for the MANIAC I computer.
• 1956, John McCarthy invents the alpha-beta search algorithm.
• 1957, The first programs that can play a full game of chess are developed, one by Alex Bernstein and one by Russian programmers using a BESM.
• 1958, NSS becomes the first chess program to use the alpha-beta search algorithm.
• 1962, The first program to play credibly, Kotok-McCarthy, is published at MIT
• 1963, Grandmaster David Bronstein defeats an M-20 running an early chess program.
• 1966–1967, The first chess match between computer programs is played. Moscow Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) defeats Kotok-McCarthy at Stanford University by telegraph over nine months.
• 1967, Mac Hack Six, by Richard Greenblatt et al. introduces transposition tables and becomes the first program to defeat a person in tournament play chessville
• 1968, David Levy makes a bet with AI researchers that no computer program would win a chess match against him within 10 years.
• 1970, The first year of the ACM North American Computer Chess Championships
• 1974, Kaissa wins the first World Computer Chess Championship
• 1977, The first microcomputer chess playing machine, CHESS CHALLENGER, was created
• 1977, The International Computer Chess Association is established.
• 1977, Chess 4.6 becomes the first chess computer to be successful at a major chess tournament.
• 1978, David Levy wins the bet made 10 years earlier, defeating the Chess 4.7 in a six-game match by a score of 4.5–1.5.
• 1980, The first year of the World Microcomputer Chess Championship
• 1980, The Fredkin Prize is established.
• 1981 Cray Blitz wins the Mississippi State Championship with a perfect 5–0 score and a performance rating of 2258. In round 4 it defeats Joe Sentef (2262) to become the first computer to beat a master in tournament play and the first computer to gain a master rating.
• 1982, Ken Thompson's hardware chess player Belle earns a US master title.
• 1988, HiTech, developed by Hans Berliner and Carl Ebeling, wins a match against grandmaster Arnold Denker 3.5 – 0.5.
• 1988, Deep Thought shares first place with Tony Miles in the Software Toolworks Championship, ahead of former world champion Mikhail Tal and several grandmasters including Samuel Reshevsky, Walter Browne and Mikhail Gurevich. It also defeats grandmaster Bent Larsen, making it the first computer to beat a GM in a tournament. Its rating for performance in this tournament of 2745 (USCF scale) was the highest obtained by a computer player.
• 1989, Deep Thought loses two exhibition games to Garry Kasparov, the reigning world champion.
• 1992, first time a microcomputer, the ChessMachine Gideon 3.1 by Ed Schröder from The Netherlands, wins the 7th World Computer Chess Championship in front of mainframes, supercomputers and special hardware.
• 1993, Deep Blue loses a four-game match against Bent Larsen.
• 1994, first time a chess program (ChessGenius) defeated a World Champion (Gary Kasparov) at a non blitz time limit.
• 1996, Deep Blue loses a six-game match against Garry Kasparov.
• 1997, Deep Blue wins a six-game match against Garry Kasparov.
• 2002, Vladimir Kramnik draws an eight-game match against Deep Fritz.
• 2003, Kasparov draws a six-game match against Deep Junior.
• 2003, Kasparov draws a four-game match against X3D Fritz.
• 2004, a team of computers (Hydra, Deep Junior and Fritz), wins 8.5–3.5 against a rather strong human team formed by Veselin Topalov, Ruslan Ponomariov and Sergey Karjakin, who had an average ELO rating of 2681.
• 2005, Hydra defeats Michael Adams 5.5–0.5.
• 2005, Rybka wins the IPCCC tournament and very quickly afterwards becomes the strongest engine
• 2006, the undisputed world champion, Vladimir Kramnik, is defeated 4–2 by Deep Fritz.
• 2009, Pocket Fritz 4 wins Copa Mercosur 9.5/10.
• 2010, Before the World chess championship, Topalov prepares by sparring against the supercomputer Blue Gene with 8,192 processors capable of 500 trillion floating point operations per second.
• 2011, the controversial decision to strip Rybka of its WCCC titles was made when the ICGA concluded they had sufficient evidence of plagiarism.