1997: The Longest Ongoing Experiment in Computer Science History

In the late 1940s, Claude Shannon wrote the pioneering work that foreshadowed the next 50 years of AI research applied to chess. In the 1950s, the father of modern computer science, Alan Turing, envisioned a chess program but did not have the computing resources to realize it. Later that decade, the first (weak) programs emerged. The first program to play in a human tournament was Richard Greenblatt’s MacHack , achieving a respectable result. The success helped inspire the creation in 1970 of the first computer tournament. Ken Thompson realized that performance at computer chess was related to the amount of computing horsepower one had. Instead of using a general-purpose computer, he built a machine that could only play chess – Belle , the first chess computer to achieve the Master’s title. A decade later, an enhanced and extended version of Thompson’s ideas was used in Deep Blue , which defeated World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The last time a human defeated a strong computer chess program at tournament play was 2005. And computers keep getting stronger.