Development and usage of artificial intelligence in chess

Ever since the first computers have existed, attempts have been made to make computers play chess, as the game is quite simple to learn, with easy to understand and specific, logical rules, yet hard to master, as there are billions of possibilities for how a game could play out. This paper describes how artificial intelligence technologies have been used in computerised chess and it outlines the algorithms that are used, as well as history, uses and a look into the future.

History of artificial intelligence in chess

The idea of creating an artificial intelligence capable of playing chess dates back to the 18th century, when diplomat and inventor Wolfgang van Kempelen built a chess-playing machine called The Turk. This machine went out to play against many remarkable people at the time. Unfortunately, The Turk was merely a box with a human player inside of it. Despite that, The Turk is often cited as the origin of non-human chess players.

Mechanical chess research was dormant until the 1950s, when the digital computer arrived. Since then, chess enthusiasts and computer engineers have designed chess-playing machines and computer programs with growing degrees of seriousness and performance.

Former World Chess Champion Mikhail Botvinnik was one of the few chess grandmasters to dedicate himself seriously to computer chess, writing many books on the subject. He was also an electrical engineer with a doctorate. Hardware in the 1960s was relatively primitive, and only the most efficient computers could do anything beyond a three-ply (a ply is one move taken by one player, one half of a turn) full-width scan, and Botvinnik lacked such devices. Therefore, Botvinnik had no choice but to explore software move selection strategies. Botvinnik served as a consultant for the Moscow Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) team in a 1965 electronic chess match between the United States and the Soviet Union.

One formative point of reference happened when the group from Northwestern College, which was capable of the Chess arrangement of programs, won the primary three ACM Computer Chess Championships (1970–72). The coming program, Chess 4.0, won that year's championship and its successors went on to win both the 1974 ACM Championship and that year's inaugural World Computer Chess Championship, some time recently winning the ACM Championship once more in 1975, 1976 and 1977. The type A execution turned out to be fair as fast and is described in greater detail in the next section. In reality, Chess 4.0 set the worldview that was and still is taken after basically by all present day Chess programs today. In 1978, an early interpretation of Insight Thompson's equipment chess machine Beauty, entered and won the North American Computer Chess Championship over the overwhelming Northwestern College Chess.

The AlphaZero software, which beat the leading chess engine in 2017, employs a Monte Carlo tree search variant that does not require rollout. "We could say that the victorious programs were designed with (chess) algorithms based on our own understanding – using, in this instance, the experience and advice of top grand masters... (Deep Blue) was just a dumb machine... (But with AlphaZero), that way of programming is changing dramatically", says Venki Ramakrishnan of the Royal Society. AlphaZero has revolutionized machine chess to the point that all but the last place finishers in the TCEC Season 20 Premier Division used a neural-network-based evaluation system.

Timeline

• 1769 – The Turk was designed by Wolfgang von Kempelen. It is disguised as a chess-playing automaton, but it is actually controlled by a human player hidden inside.