CHAPTER 31

Computer chess–the first

moments

jack copeland and dani prinz

T

he 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.

kasparov on Turing

Albert Square, Manchester, 2012. The time was coming up to 9 o’clock on a grim summer morn-

ing, 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 coun-

tries: 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 halt-

ingly 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