It evolved over time, perfecting the rules - and spread to the Persians from there. Chess is a game that came out of 7th century India, originally called chaturanga. With Houdini 6, you not only gain in terms of computing power, but also in terms of time The new engine delivers better performance even if you only let it calculate for half as long as the previous version Houdini 6 has been put to the test in various areas and thoroughly refined in all the right places: position evaluation, search, time.
![]() And one of those people was Leonardo Torres y Quevedo who built a board that also had electomagnets move pieces and light bulbs to let you know when the king was in check or mate. These machines inspired people to think about what was possible. Again, people like Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Houdini were bested, along with thousands of onlookers.Charles Gumpel built another in 1876 - this time going from a person hiding in a box to using a remote control. He would become the first Russian Grandmaster in 1950, in the early days of the Cold War. Mikhail Botvinnik was 9 at that point and the Russian revolution wound down in 1923 when the Soviet Union was founded following the fall of the Romanovs. At the time even a simplified set of instructions was revolutionary and he showed his invention off at the Paris where notable other thinkers were at a conference, including Norbert Weiner who later described how minimax search could be used to play chess in his book Cybernetics.Quevedo had built an analytical machine based on Babbage’s works in 1920 but adding electromagnets for memory and would continue building mechanical or analog calculating machines throughout his career. ![]() Houdini 6 Chess Full Game InThe other thing happening was that computers were getting better. One we are building better and better search algorithms to allow for computers to think more moves ahead in smarter ways. Here we see two things happening. Still the BESM managed to ship a working computer that could play a full game in 1957.Meanwhile John McCarthy at MIT introduced the idea of an alpha-beta search algorithm to minimize the number of nodes to be traversed in a search and he and Alan Kotok shipped A Chess Playing Program for the IBM 7090 Computer, which would be updated by Richard Greenblatt when moving from the IBM mainframes to a DEC PDP-6 in 1965, as a side project for his work on Project MAC while at MIT. He focused on selective searches which never got too far as the Soviet machines of the era weren’t that powerful. He wanted to teach computers to play a full game of chess. By 1971 Ken Thompson of Bell Labs, in a sign of the times, wrote a computer chess game for Unix. For his work, Greenblatt would become an honorary member of the US Chess Federation.By 1970 there were enough computers playing chess to have the North American Computer Chess Championships and colleges around the world started holding competitions. He tuned the algorithms, what we would call machine learning today, and in 1967 became the first computer program to defeat a person at the tournament level and get a chess rating. And then came IBM to the party.Deep Blue began with researcher Feng-hsiung Hsu, as a project called ChipTest at Carnegie Mellon University. He even got the computer to the rank of master but the gains became much more incremental. He and others added move generators, special circuits, dedicated memory for the transposition table, and refined the alpha-beta algorithm started by McCarthy, getting to the point where it could evaluate nearly 200,000 moves a second. By the 80s regular old computers could evaluate thousands of moves.Ken Thompson kept at it, developing Belle from 1972 and it continued on to 1983. Computer games that played chess shipped to regular humans, dedicated physical games, little cheep electronics knockoffs. From there computers got incrementally better at playing chess. From the human powered codification of electromechanical foundations of the industry to the emergence of computational thinking with Shannon and cybernetics to MIT on IBM servers when Artificial Intelligence was young to Project MAC with Greenblatt to Bell Labs with a front seat view of Unix to college competitions to racks of IBM servers. And chess can be pretty much unbeatable today on an M1 MacBook Air, which comes pretty darn close to running at a teraflop.Chess gives us an unobstructed view at the emergence of computing in an almost linear fashion. Deep Blue was comprised of 32 RS/6000s running 200 MHz chips, split across two racks, and running IBM AIX - with a whopping 11.38 gigaflops of speed. They went back to work and built Deep Blue, which beat Kasparov in their third attempt in 1997. But with IBM’s backing he had all the memory and CPU power he could ask for.Arthur Hoane and Murray Campell joined and Jerry Brody from IBM led the team to sprint towards taking their device, Deep Thought, to a match where reigning World Champion Gary Kasparov beat the machine in 1989. He started with Thompson’s Belle. And the mechanical Turk concept even lives on with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk services where we can hire people to do things that are still easier for humans than machines.
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