An example heuristic could be that if a move leads to the player's king being in checkmate, then the algorithm should not look any farther down that path of the game tree, since we know the player will never want to make that move. However, the "big time" programs build even further upon these by implementing "heuristics", simple rules which can cut down on computation time, along with optimizations of the minimax algorithm, given the specific structure of chess. Nowadays, one can run chess programs even more advanced than Deep Blue on a standard desktop or laptop computer.Įquipped with an evaluation function and an implementation of the minimax algorithm, one can already design an incredibly effective chess-playing program. Since the seminal 1997 victory, chess-playing computer programs have built upon Deep Blue's developments to become even more proficient and efficient. Despite having lost a previous match against Kasparov in 1996, Deep Blue won the 1997 match 3.5 to 2.5 and became the first computer program to defeat a world chess champion in match play. The turning point came in 1997, when Chessmaster Garry Kasparov faced off against IBM's chess-playing computer Deep Blue in New York, NY in an official match under tournament regulations. I'd stake my life on it"), chess-playing computers began to beat extremely proficient chess players in exhibition matches. Despite the lingering skepticism of the chess community (when asked to confirm his belief that Garry Kasparov could beat any existing computer chess program, Levy stated, "I'm positive. In the mid-1990s, however, the tides began to change. Chessmaster and computer chess pioneer David Levy famously made the following statement in 1968: "Prompted by the lack of conceptual progress over more than two decades, I am tempted to speculate that a computer program will not gain the title of International Master before the turn of the century and that the idea of an electronic world champion belongs only in the pages of a science fiction book." The public was doubtful that a machine would ever be able to defeat a proficient human chess player. This work provided a framework for all future research in computer chess playing.Īs was the case with many subfields of Artificial Intelligence at this time, progress in the development of chess-playing hardware lagged behind the theoretical frameworks developed in the 60s and 70s, building on Shannon's work. In 1950, Claude Shannon published a groundbreaking paper entitled "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess", which first put forth the idea of a function for evaluating the efficacy of a particular move and a "minimax" algorithm which took advantage of this evaluation function by taking into account the efficacy of future moves that would be made available by any particular move. With the advent of computers in the 1940s, researchers and hobbyists began the first serious attempts at making an intelligent chess-playing machine. Although the actual machine worked by allowing a human chess player to sit inside of it and decide the machine's moves, audiences around the world were fascinated by the idea of a machine that could perform intelligent tasks at the same level as humans. In 1770, the Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled "The Turk", a (fake) chess-playing machine. For much of modern history, chess playing has been seen as a "litmus test" of the ability for computers to act intelligently.
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