Human-computer chess matches

This article documents the progress of significant human–computer chess matches.

Chess computers were first able to beat strong chess players in the late 1980s. Their most famous success was the victory of Deep Blue over then World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, but there was some controversy over whether the match conditions favored the computer.

In 2002–2003 three human-computer matches were drawn. But whereas Deep Blue was a specialized machine, these were chess programs running on commercially available computers.

Chess programs running on commercially-available desktop computers had convincing victories against human players in matches in 2005 and 2006. Since that time, chess programs running on commercial hardware - more recently including mobile phones - have been able to defeat even the strongest human players.

In 1956 MANIAC, developed at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, became the first computer to defeat a human in a chess-like game. Playing with the simplified Los Alamos rules, it defeated a novice in 23 moves.

In 1966 MIT student Richard Greenblatt wrote the chess program Mac Hack VI using MIDAS macro assembly language on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-6 computer with 16K of memory. Mac Hack VI evaluated 10 positions per second.

In 1967, several MIT students and professors (organized by Seymour Papert) challenged Dr. Hubert Dreyfus to play a game of chess against Mac Hack VI. Dreyfus, a professor of philosophy at MIT, wrote the book What Computers Can’t Do, questioning the computer’s ability to serve as a model for the human brain. He also asserted that no computer program could defeat even a 10-year-old child at chess. Dreyfus accepted the challenge. Herbert A. Simon, an artificial intelligence pioneer, watched the game. He said “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.” The computer was beating Dreyfus when he found a move, which could have captured the enemy queen. The only way the computer could get out of this was to keep Dreyfus in checks with its own queen until it could fork the queen and king, and then exchange them. That is what the computer did. Soon, Dreyfus was losing. Finally, the computer checkmated Dreyfus in the middle of the board.

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