Computer chess—the first moments

The electronic computer has profoundly changed chess. This chapter describes the birth of computer chess, from the very first discussions of computational chess at Bletchley Park during the war to the first chess moves ever calculated by an electronic computer. We cover a number of historic chess programs—including Turing’s own ‘Turochamp’—and recapture some of the atmosphere of those early days of computer chess. Albert Square, Manchester, 2012. The time was coming up to 9 o’clock on a grim summer morning, two days after what would have been Turing’s 100th birthday. Litter from the Olympic torch ceremony still scattered the ground. There were unusual numbers of chess enthusiasts and computer scientists in the square, hurrying past the awkwardly posturing statue of William Gladstone and up the steps at the entrance to Manchester Town Hall. Inside, they filed past more statues—chemist John Dalton, physicist James Joule—and took their seats in the crowded gothic-revival great hall. News of Turing’s centenary celebrations had reached over forty countries: fans in other time zones clicked to join the audience, watching their screens and waiting for the big event to start. Shortly after 9, a flawlessly groomed Garry Kasparov took the stage. Born in the Soviet Union in 1963, Kasparov (Fig. 31.1) became world chess champion at the age of only 22. He has gone down in history as the first reigning champion to be beaten by a computer. In a New York TV studio on the thirty-ninth floor of a Seventh Avenue skyscraper, IBM’s chess computer DeepBlue crushed Kasparov in 1997 (see Ch. 27). Fifteen years later he had come to Manchester to honour Turing, the first pioneer of computer chess. Seeming a bit nervous at first—until his natural ebullience reasserted itself—Kasparov haltingly told the crowd: ‘Apart from personal love of the game, Turing did serious work with chess as a model of mechanical thinking and machine intelligence’. Yet Turing, he said, ‘was a fairly terrible chess player’.