The lyrics above is from U.D.O. Man and Machine.
In the first episode of the Terminator we could see a clash between machine and man. The machine was much more powerful than the soldier, so it was a miracle that the man was able to beat the machine, but in real life, miracles don’t happen.
In chess, machine vs. man duels existed since chess programs exist, but they were easy fights for GM’s until the 90′s. We all remember the matches of Kasparov against the computer and that was a great fight, but since 2005 the fight against the computers is like watching the first episode of the Terminator tetrology, but without the miracles.
Here is a history of computer chess, taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess:
* 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.[24][25]
* 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.
* 1958, NSS becomes the first chess program to use the alpha-beta search algorithm.
* 1958, The first programs that could play a full game of chess were developed, one by Alex Bernstein and one by Russian programmers using a BESM.
* 1962, The first program to play credibly, Kotok-McCarthy, is published at MIT
* 1966-1967, The first chess match between computer programs is played. Moscow Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) defeated 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 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 won the Mississippi State Championship with a perfect 5-0 score and a performance rating of 2258. In round 4 it defeated 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 a 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.[26][27]
* 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.
* 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 became very fast afterwards the strongest engine [28]
* 2006, the undisputed world champion, Vladimir Kramnik, is defeated 4-2 by Deep Fritz.
* 2009, Pocket Fritz 4 wins Copa Mercosur 9.5/10.[15]
* 2010, During the World chess championship Topalov used the supercomputer blue gene with 8,192 processors capable of 500 trillion floating point operations per second.[29]
How do computers play:
- It evaluates the positions between -100 and 100 (usually, the theoretical value instead of + or -100 is + or -infinity), 0 means equality, -100 means that the computer is absolutely sure Black will win, 100 means that the computer is absolutely sure White will win
- The computers usually have a built-in database which is obviously not fair, because if a player brings a book about openings to a tournament and reads it while playing, he will be punished.
- The computers are very good tacticians, they see the combinations in an extreme depth
- Computers are good technicians, they play the endings impeccably when possible
- Computers have tablebases (endgames of 5 pieces calculated to the end of the game), which makes sure they are never wrong in those types of endings (I don’t know for sure, but I think computers can’t use tablebases at tournaments.)
- Computers have some built-in positional knowledge, like the value of the pieces, the necessity to defend the king and attack the opposite king, knowledge of the pawn structure, the bishop pair and so on. However, they can’t understand deep positional play, because that’s human inspiration and the silicon monsters don’t understand those. If you play in deep positional style, the computer might not be able to evaluate well the position and might make mistakes.
Source:http://vignaioli.info/computer-chess-algorithms
