The Greenblatt Chess Program, also called Mac Hack VI or MacHack VI
was a chess program, developed in 1966 and 1967 at MIT by Richard Greenblatt assisted by Donald Eastlake for a DEC PDP-6. It was developed entirely in MIDAS, the PDP-6 macro assembler. The Greenblatt Chess Program was the first computer program to play chess in human tournament competitions and be granted a chess rating [1] .
In his 1970 paper A New Hashing Method with Application for Game Playing[4], where he introduced Zobrist hashing, Albert Zobrist mentions a possible hashing method to obtain an integer which describes the board configuration, and then to divide the integer by the hash table size and use the remainder as hash address and the quotient as key. However, the integer which describes the board may occupy many computer words, and the divide will be complicated and slow. Further the quotient may occupy several words as well, thus most of the transposition table would be occupied by these keys if type 1 errors were to be avoided. While Zobrist mentions Mac Hack VI used a 32K hash table, he does not made it explicit that Mac Hack used this divide technique.
Type B
Inspired by the Kotok-McCarthy-Program, Greenblatt thought he could do better and he succeeded to do so. Mac Hack VI was Shannon Type B, but was less narrow than Kotok-McCarthy's {4, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0} and used a width of {15, 15, 9, 9, 7, ...} in tournament play. Quote from Oral History of Richard Greenblatt[5] :
Yeah. Well, both computers and particularly the quality of the analysis. Most of this printout was analysis from the Kotok program. And I also saw some kind of a textual thing, which I don’t believe was Kotok’s thesis, but which had some of the same information as Kotok’s thesis. It was probably some kind of a technical report, or something, that was anticipatory to Kotok’s thesis. Anyway, one of the things I remembered, and which I just talked with Kotok, as a matter of fact, a few days ago, was the detail that they had is Alpha Beta, and so forth, and they had these whips, and the whips were set at 4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1. In other words, that was how many. It would first look at the top ply. It would look at the four best moves. The next plys, it would look at the three best. Next ply, two best, next ply, one best. Well, I just recognized immediately that that was incredibly wrong.
You see, basically looking at only one wide, you just have no signals or noise function. In other words, you look at one move, which you think is the best, but there’s a tremendous amount of noise. Well, you look at some more moves, and if you find that one of those are better, you’ve effectively rejected some noise. Well, essentially the thing that I knew that they did, they were very weak chess players, both McCarthy and Kotok. And basically they had a very romanticized view of chess. And so I knew, however, that chess is a very, very precise game. And you really- the name of the game is take the other guy’s pieces, and you don’t just go along. In any kind of a strong game, you don’t just lose pieces, win pieces, lose pieces, win pieces. I mean, if you lose even a single pawn without compensation, then you may have drawing chances, if you’re lucky. Otherwise, the game is lost. Losing more than one pawn almost invariably results in loss of the game, period.
Opening book
Mac Hack VI incorporated a table of opening positions with selected replies. The opening book was compiled by two MIT students, Larry Kaufman, a chess master and top rated U. S. Junior player, and Alan Baisley a chess expert. It is noteworthy that Larry Kaufman started his computer chess career over 40 years ago as team member of Mac Hack!
Quote from Oral History of Richard Greenblatt:
And it was compacted pretty efficiently. And you know, there was a – by later standards it wasn't so big, but at the time it was pretty good sized. I don't know I think it was probably 8,000 or 10,000 moves in there. He – Kaufman spent quite a while doing it. Of course, a number of the moves, you know, would – the game would just play it. There was very little chance of it actually staying in the book. You know, the – but I think Kaufman did a good job and he did – we did perceive some of the – well of course, one of the basic things about computer programs, really to the present day, is that they're very tactical. It's much easier for them to see that the tactics than the strategy. So what's called a closed position is hard for a computer. That's where all the pieces are blocking each other and it's very long maneuvering. Whereas, an open position which is sort of tactical combinations is much more to the computer's liking. So therefore, when designing the opening book, you want to kind of play offbeat and kind of unbalanced type openings that tend to lead to these closed position – open positions, which are then good for the computer. And so we realized that and you know, I think Kaufman did a fairly good job of ...
Matches
Robert Q
First tournament game by a computer, Carl Wagner (2190) - Mac Hack VI aka "Robert Q", January 21, 1967 [6]
"Robert Q", a computer programmed to play chess, was beaten in its first competition with a human, Carl Wagner. The computer, at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., was operated by Allen Moulton, and R. William Gosper (rear right), while Wagner made his moves several miles away in the YMCU in Boston. The moves were relayed into the computer by teletype operated by Alan Baisley. "Robert Q" was entered as an experiment, in the monthly Boylston Chess Club Tournament at the Young Mens Christian Union.
In 1967 AI critic Hubert Dreyfus[9][10] at MIT was challenged by Greenblatt to play a game against his program.
Quote from Oral History of Richard Greenblatt:
And so then as word got around- Well, there was a guy a MIT in those days named Hubert Dreyfus, who was a prominent critic of artificial intelligent, and made some statements of the form, you know, computers will never be any good for chess, and so forth. And, of course, he was, again, very romanticized. He was not a strong chess player. However, he thought he was, or I guess he knew was wasn’t world class, but he thought he was a lot better than he was. So anyway, I had this chess program and basically Jerry Sussman, who’s a professor at MIT now, and who was also a member of our group, had played. It was around and it was available on the machine. People played it, and so forth. And basically Sussman brought over Dreyfus and said, well, how would you like to have a friendly game or something. Dreyfus said, oh, sure. And sure enough, Dreyfus sat down and got beat. So this immediately got quite a bit of publicity.
It was a wonderful game - a real cliffhanger between two woodpushers with bursts of insights and fiendish plans ... great moments of drama and disaster that go in such games.
Mac Hack was ported to a PDP-10 and was the first computer chess program to be widely distributed. It didn't play any ACM or ICCA tournaments, though. In 1977 Mac Hack played three exhibition games against Bobby Fischer[17] . In 1978, Mac Hack (dubbed Machack) played a match versus the readers of the Computerwoche, a German weekly computer magazine affiliated with the International Data Group, one move per week [18][19][20] :
see main article CHEOPS
In the end of the 70s a brute force version of Mac Hack was ported to the Chess-orientated Processing System CHEOPS[21] , one of the first dedicated hardware approaches in computer chess, which original conception and hardware design was instrumented by Edward Fredkin. Unfortunately it never competed against other programs of that time.
Microsoft was founded about 25 years ago, and I can remember at the time thinking, "Well, if I go out and do this really commercial stuff, I’m going to miss these big advances in AI that will be coming very soon." (Laughter.) And so I come from the school of AI optimist. You know, I can remember being at Harvard and back then AI was the Greenblatt Chess Program and Maxima and Eliza and people literally felt that within five to ten years that some of these tough problems would be solved.
Paul Rushton, Tony Marsland (1973). Current Chess Programs: A Summary of their Potential and Limitations. INFOR Journal of the Canadian Information Processing Society Vol. 11, No. 1, pdf
Monroe Newborn (1975). Computer Chess. Academic Press, New York, N.Y. ISBN 0-125-17250-8.
Chapter IV. The Greenblatt Chess Program
^Albert Zobrist (1970). A New Hashing Method with Application for Game Playing. Technical Report #88, Computer Science Department, The University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA. Reprinted (1990) in ICCA Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2, pdf, pp. 8-9
was a chess program, developed in 1966 and 1967 at MIT by Richard Greenblatt assisted by Donald Eastlake for a DEC PDP-6. It was developed entirely in MIDAS, the PDP-6 macro assembler. The Greenblatt Chess Program was the first computer program to play chess in human tournament competitions and be granted a chess rating [1] .
Table of Contents
Hash Table
Mac Hack VI was the first chess program which uses a transposition table, but not yet iterative deepening. It regular searched five plies plus quiescence search and a conditional intermediate layer if own pieces were en prise.In his 1970 paper A New Hashing Method with Application for Game Playing [4], where he introduced Zobrist hashing, Albert Zobrist mentions a possible hashing method to obtain an integer which describes the board configuration, and then to divide the integer by the hash table size and use the remainder as hash address and the quotient as key. However, the integer which describes the board may occupy many computer words, and the divide will be complicated and slow. Further the quotient may occupy several words as well, thus most of the transposition table would be occupied by these keys if type 1 errors were to be avoided. While Zobrist mentions Mac Hack VI used a 32K hash table, he does not made it explicit that Mac Hack used this divide technique.
Type B
Inspired by the Kotok-McCarthy-Program, Greenblatt thought he could do better and he succeeded to do so. Mac Hack VI was Shannon Type B, but was less narrow than Kotok-McCarthy's {4, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0} and used a width of {15, 15, 9, 9, 7, ...} in tournament play. Quote from Oral History of Richard Greenblatt [5] :Opening book
Mac Hack VI incorporated a table of opening positions with selected replies. The opening book was compiled by two MIT students, Larry Kaufman, a chess master and top rated U. S. Junior player, and Alan Baisley a chess expert. It is noteworthy that Larry Kaufman started his computer chess career over 40 years ago as team member of Mac Hack!Quote from Oral History of Richard Greenblatt:
He – Kaufman spent quite a while doing it. Of course, a number of the moves, you know, would – the game would just play it. There was very little chance of it actually staying in the book. You know, the – but I think Kaufman did a good job and he did – we did perceive some of the – well of course, one of the basic things about computer programs, really to the present day, is that they're very tactical. It's much easier for them to see that the tactics than the strategy. So what's called a closed position is hard for a computer. That's where all the pieces are blocking each other and it's very long maneuvering. Whereas, an open position which is sort of tactical combinations is much more to the computer's liking. So therefore, when designing the opening book, you want to kind of play offbeat and kind of unbalanced type openings that tend to lead to these closed position – open positions, which are then good for the computer. And so we realized that and you know, I think Kaufman did a fairly good job of ...
Matches
Robert Q
First tournament game by a computer, Carl Wagner (2190) - Mac Hack VI aka "Robert Q", January 21, 1967 [6]The Dreyfus Match
In 1967 AI critic Hubert Dreyfus [9] [10] at MIT was challenged by Greenblatt to play a game against his program.Quote from Oral History of Richard Greenblatt:
Herbert Simon, an AI pioneer, watched the match. He said [11] :
IFIP Match
In August 1968, at the 4th IFIP conference held in Edinburgh, Mac Hack running on a PDP-10 won an exhibition match versus a program written by John J. Scott, running on a ICL 1909/5. The game was analyzed by Jack Good, as published in Donald Michie's Machine Intelligence 4 [12].ETH-MIT Match
In 1968, Gerald Tripard, postdoc at ETH Zurich and co-author of the chess program Charly, asked Richard Greenblatt for a match versus Mac Hack VI. Three games were played in October and November 1968 via ham radio [13], all three won by Mac Hack VI [14] [15] [16].The 70s
Mac Hack was ported to a PDP-10 and was the first computer chess program to be widely distributed. It didn't play any ACM or ICCA tournaments, though. In 1977 Mac Hack played three exhibition games against Bobby Fischer [17] . In 1978, Mac Hack (dubbed Machack) played a match versus the readers of the Computerwoche, a German weekly computer magazine affiliated with the International Data Group, one move per week [18] [19] [20] :CHEOPS
see main article CHEOPSIn the end of the 70s a brute force version of Mac Hack was ported to the Chess-orientated Processing System CHEOPS [21] , one of the first dedicated hardware approaches in computer chess, which original conception and hardware design was instrumented by Edward Fredkin. Unfortunately it never competed against other programs of that time.
Remark by Bill Gates
Remark by Bill Gates on the 17. IJCAI 2001, Seattle, Washington, USA, August 7, 2001 [22] :See also
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Chapter IV. The Greenblatt Chess Program
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