In 1949 Shannon published a groundbreaking paper on computer chess entitled Programming a Computer for Playing Chess[1] . It describes how a machine or computer could be made to play a reasonable game of chess. His process for having the computer decide on which move to make is a minimax procedure, based on an evaluation function of a given chess position.
Dr. Claude E. Shannon demonstrating to Chessmaster Edward Lasker his (home-made) electric chess automation, build in 1949. The machine could handle up to six pieces, and was designed to test various programming methods. With one hundred and fifty relay operations required to complete a move, it arrived at the reply to an opponent's play in ten to fifteen seconds. It had built into it a random element, and as a result did not necessarily always make the same move when faced with the same position.
Computer pioneer Claude Shannon and chess champion Edward Lasker at MIT,
ponder the computational aspects of playing chess at Shannon's early relay-based
chess machine [4]
Without the sense of alpha-beta, and inspired by the experiments of Adriaan de Groot[10] , Shannon and early programmers favored Type B strategy. Type B searches use some type of static heuristics in order to only look at branches that look important - with some risk to oversee some serious tactics not covered by the plausible move selector. Type B was most popular until the 1970's, when Type A programs had enough processing power and more efficient brute force algorithms to become stronger. Today most programs are closer to Type A, but have some characteristics of a Type B as mentioned in selectivity.
^Groot, A.D. de (1946). Het denken van den Schaker, een experimenteel-psychologische studie. Ph.D. thesis, University of Amsterdam; N.V. Noord-Hollandse Uitgevers Maatschappij, Amsterdam. Translated with the help of George Baylor, with additions (in 1965) as Thought and Choice in Chess. Mouton Publishers, The Hague. ISBN 90-279-7914-6. (amazon)
was an American electrical engineer, mathematician and researcher from MIT and since 1941 Bell Laboratories. One of the pioneers of the information theory .
In 1949 Shannon published a groundbreaking paper on computer chess entitled Programming a Computer for Playing Chess [1] . It describes how a machine or computer could be made to play a reasonable game of chess. His process for having the computer decide on which move to make is a minimax procedure, based on an evaluation function of a given chess position.
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Chess Automation
Quote of the text on the back on the photo, as given in ICCA Journal, Vol. 12, No. 4: [3] :ponder the computational aspects of playing chess at Shannon's early relay-based
chess machine [4]
WCCC 1980
Tony Marsland, Dave Slate, David Levy, Claude Shannon, Ken Thompson, Betty Shannon,
Tom Truscott [6]
WCCC 1989
Shannon's Types
Claude Shannon categorized two types of search [9] :Without the sense of alpha-beta, and inspired by the experiments of Adriaan de Groot [10] , Shannon and early programmers favored Type B strategy. Type B searches use some type of static heuristics in order to only look at branches that look important - with some risk to oversee some serious tactics not covered by the plausible move selector. Type B was most popular until the 1970's, when Type A programs had enough processing power and more efficient brute force algorithms to become stronger. Today most programs are closer to Type A, but have some characteristics of a Type B as mentioned in selectivity.
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