A Short History of Computer Chess

Abstract

Of the early chess-playing machines the best known was exhibited by Baron von Kempelen of Vienna in 1769. As might be expected, they were all conjurer’s tricks and grand hoaxes, as Bell (1978) and Levy and Newborn (1982) explain. In contrast, around 1890 a Spanish engineer, Torres y Quevedo, designed a true mechanical player for KRK (king and rook against king) endgames. A later version of that machine was displayed at the Paris Exhibition of 1914 and now resides in a museum at Madrid’s Polytechnic University (Levy and Newborn 1982). Despite the success of this electro-mechanical device, further advances on chess automata did not come until the 1940s. During that decade there was a sudden spurt of activity as several leading engineers and mathematicians, intrigued by the power of computers, began to express their ideas about computer chess. Some, like Tihamer Nemes of Budapest (Nemes 1951) and Konrad Zuse of Germany (Zuse 1945), tried a hardware approach, but their computer-chess works did not find wide acceptance. Others, like noted scientist Alan Turing, found success with a more philosophical tone, stressing the importance of the stored program concept (Turing et al. 1953).¹ Today, best recognized are Adriaan de Groot’s 1946 doctoral dissertation (de Groot 1965) and the much referenced paper on algorithms for playing chess by Claude Shannon (1950). Shannon’s inspirational work was read and re-read by computer-chess enthusiasts, and provided a basis for most early chess programs.