Computer chess: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:58, 15 March 2004

Revision as of 03:05, 15 March 2004

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[[Chess]] enthusiasts and computer engineers have attempted to build, with increasing degrees of seriousness and success, chess-playing machines since [[1769]]. Motivations can essentially be consolidated into two: firstly, to build a machine to play chess with for solo entertainment, and secondly, to investigate chess as a problem which might provide some insight into human cognition. In this view, the history of computer chess is both a spectacular success and a virtually complete failure.

Chess-playing computers are available for negligible cost, and there are many programs (even the free [[GNU Chess]], Amy, Pepito, [ftp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt/ [Crafty]], and [http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/ more]) that play a game that, with the aid of virtually any modern [[personal computer]] can defeat most master players under tournament conditions, while top commercial programs like [[Fritz]] have surpassed even world champion caliber players at blitz and short time controls.

However, to the surprise and disappointment of many, chess has taught us little about building machines that offer human-like intelligence, or indeed do anything except play excellent chess. For this reason, computer chess, (as with other games, like [[Scrabble]]) is no longer of great academic interest to researchers in [[artificial intelligence]], and has largely been replaced by more intuitive games like ''[[game of go|go]]'' as a testing paradigm. Chess-playing programs essentially explore huge numbers of potential future moves by both players and apply a relatively simple evaluation function to the positions that result where as a game like ''go'' [[computer go|challenges]] programmers to consider conceptual approaches to play.