by Bill Wall
In 1947, Alan Turing specified the first chess program for chess.
In 1948 the UNIVAC computer was advertised as the strongest computer in the world. So strong, that it could play chess and gin rummy so perfectly that no human opponent could beat it.
In 1949 Claude Shannon described how to program a computer and a Ferranti digital machine was programmed to solve mates in two moves. He proposed basic strategies for restricting the number of possibilities to be considered in a game of chess.
In 1950, Alan Turing wrote the first computer chess program.
By 1956 experiments on a MANIAC I computer (11,000 operations a second) at Los Alamos, using a 6x6 chessboard, was playing chess. This was the first documented account of a running chess program.
In 1957 a chess program was written by Bernstein for an IBM 704. This was the first full-fledged game of chess by a computer.
The first chess computer to play in a tournament was MacHack VI (PDP-6) written at MIT by Greenblatt. The computer entered the 1966 Massachussets Amateur championship, scoring 1 draw and 4 losses for a USCF rating of 1243.
In 1958, a chess program beat a human player for the first time (a secretary who was taught how to play chess just before the game).
In 1959 some of the first chess computer programmers predicted that a chess computer would be world chess champion before 1970.
In 1966 a USSR chess program defeated a Stanford IBM 7090 program.
In 1967 MacHACK VI became the first program to beat a human (rate 1510), at the Massachussets State Championship.
In 1968 International Master David Levy made a $3,000 bet that no chess computer would beat him in 10 years. He won his bet. The original bet was with John McCarthy, a distinguished researcher in Artificial Intelligence.
In 1970 the first all-computer championship was held in New York and won by CHESS 3.0, a program written by Atkin and Gorlen at Northwestern University. Six programs had entered.
In 1971 the Institute of Control Science, Moscow, created KAISSA using a British computer to play chess.
In 1974 World Correspondence Champion Hans Berliner wrote his PhD dissertation on "Chess Computers as Problem Solving."
In 1974 KAISSA won the world computer chess championship held in Stockholm with a perfect 4-0 score.
In 1975 Grandmaster David Bronstein used the endgame database in KAISSA to win an adjourned game in a tournament in Vilnius.
In 1976 CHESS 4.5 won the Class B section of the Paul Masson tournament in Northern California. The performance rating was 1950.
In 1976 a computer program was used to make the chess pairings at the chess olympiad in Haifa.
In 1977 the first microcomputer chess playing machine, CHESS CHALLENGER, was created. The International Computer Chess Association (ICCA) was founded by computer chess programmers. It has about 400 members.
In 1977 CHESS 4.5 won the Minnesota Open winning 5 games and losing one. It had a performance rating of 2271. Stenberg (1969) became the first Class A player to lose to a computer.
In 1977 SNEAKY PETE was the first chess computer to play in a U.S. Open, held in Columbus, Ohio.
In 1977 Michael Stean became the first grandmaster to lose to a computer; it was a blitz game.
In 1978 SARGON won the first tournament for microcomputers, held in San Jose. David Levy collected his 10 year bet by defeating CHESS 4.7 in Toronto with the score of 3 wins and one draw. The drawn game was the first time a computer drew an international master. Computer chess experts predicted that a computer would be world chess champion in 10 years.
In 1980 CHAMPION SENSORY CHALLENGER won the first world microcomputer championship, held in London.
In 1981 CRAY BLITZ won the Mississipi 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 (2258).
In 1982 BELLE was confiscated by the State Department as it was heading to the Soviet Union to participate in a computer chess tournament. The State Department claimed it was a violation of a technology transfer law to ship a high technology computer to a foreign country. BELLE later played in the U.S. Open speed championship and took 2nd place.
By 1982 computer chess companies were topping $100 million in sales.
In 1983 the first microcomputer beat a master in tournament play.
In 1984 a microcomputer won a tournament for the first time against mainframes, held in Canada.
In 1985 HITECH achieved a performace rating of 2530.
In 1987 the U.S. Amateur Championship became the first national championship to be directed by a computer program.
In 1988 DEEP THOUGHT and Grandmaster Tony Miles shared first place in the U.S. Open championship. DEEP THOUGHT had a 2745 performance rating.
In 1988 HITECH won the Pennsylvania State Chess Championship after defeating International Master Ed Formanek (2485). HITECH defeated Grandmaster Arnold Denker in a match.
In 1988 Grandmaster Bent Larsen became the first GM to lose to a computer in a major tournament - the American Open.
In 1989 DEEP THOUGHT won the world computer championship in Canada, with a rating of 2600. DEEP THOUGHT defeated Grandmaster Robert Byrne in a match game. DEEP THOUGHT can analyze 2 million positions a second. In March 1989, Garry Kasparov defeated Deep Thought in a match. Deep Thought easily beat International Master David Levy in a match. Deep Thought Developers claimed a computer would be world chess champion in three years.
In 1990 World Champion Anatoly Karpov lost to MEPHISTO in a simultaneous exhibition in Munich. MEPHISTO also beat grandmasters Robert Huebner and David Bronstein. MEPHISTO won the German blitz championship and earned an International Master norm by scoring 7-4 in the Dortmund Open.
In 1992 Fritz 2 defeated Kasparov in a 5 minute game in Cologne, Germany. This was the first time a program defeated a world champion at speed chess.
In March, 1993 GM Judit Polgar lost to Deep Thought in a 30 minute game.
In 1994 WCHESS became the first computer to outperform grandmasters at the Harvard Cup in Boston.
In 1994 Kasparov lost to Fritz 3 in Munich in a blitz tournament. The program also defeated Anand, Short, Gelfand, and Kramnik. Grandmaster Robert Huebner refused to play it and lost on forfeit, the first time a GM has forfeited to a computer.
At the 1994 Intel Speed Chess Grand Priz, Kasparov lost to Chess Genius 2.95 in a 25 minute game.
The 13th World Micro Computer Chess Championship (WMCCC) was held in Paderborn, Germany in October, 1995. It was won by MChess Pro 5.0 (by Marty Hirsch) after a playoff with Chess Genius (by Richard Lang).
The 8th World Computer Chess Championships were held in May, 1995 in Hong Kong. The event was won by Fritz, after it won a playoff game against StarSocrates.
In November 1995, Kasparov beat Fritz 4 in London with a win and a draw.
The 6th Harvard Cup Human Versus Computer chess challenge was held in New York in December, 1995. The Grandmasters won with a score of 23.5 to the computers 12.5 score. The computers scored 35%, a slight decrease in performance from 1994. Joel Benjamin and Michael Rohde had the best human scores with 4.5 out of 6. The best machine was Virtual Chess (I-Motion Interactive) with 3.5 out of 6.
In February 1996, Garry Kasparov beat IBM's DEEP BLUE chess computer 4-2. Deep Blue won the first game, becoming the first computer ever to beat a world chess champion at tournament level under serious tournament conditions.
The 11th AEGON Computer Chess Tournament (Mankind vs Machine) was held on April 10-17, 1996 in The Hague, Netherlands. There were 50 masters, International Masters, and Grandmasters and 50 computers (most playing on HP Pentium-166 machines with 16MB of RAM). Yasser Seirawan won the event with 6 straight wins and no losses. The best computer was QUEST, with 4.5/6 and a 2652 performance rating. The machines won with 162.5 points versus the humans with 137.5 points.
The 14th World Microcomputer chess championship was held in Jakarta in October, 1996. It was won by SHREDDER, followed by FERRET.
On May 11 1997, DEEP BLUE defeated Garry Kasparov in a 6 game match. This was the first time a computer defeated a reigning world champion in a classical chess match.
In 1999 the highest rated chess computer is Hiarcs 7.0, followed by Fritz 5.32, Fritz 5.0, Junior 5.0, Nimzo 98, Hiarcs 6.0, Rebel 9.0, MChess Pro 7.1, Rebel 8.0, and MChess Pro 6.0 (based on SSDF ratings as of Jan 28, 1999).