Chess was a pioneering chess program from the 1970s, authored by Larry Atkin and David Slate at Northwestern University

Northwestern University

Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....

. Chess ran on Control Data Corporation

Control Data Corporation

Control Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....

's line of supercomputer

Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...

s. It dominated the first computer chess

Computer chess

Computer chess is computer architecture encompassing hardware and software capable of playing chess autonomously without human guidance. Computer chess acts as solo entertainment , as aids to chess analysis, for computer chess competitions, and as research to provide insights into human...

 tournaments, such as the World Computer Chess Championship

World Computer Chess Championship

World Computer Chess Championship is an annual event where computer chess engines compete against each other. The event is organized by the International Computer Games Association...

 and ACM's North American Computer Chess Championship

North American Computer Chess Championship

The North American Computer Chess Championship was a computer chess championship held from 1970 to 1994. It was organised by the Association for Computing Machinery and by Dr. Monty Newborn, Professor of Computer Science at McGill University. It was one of the first computer chess tournaments. The...

. Chess was the first published use of the bitboard

Bitboard

A bitboard is a data structure commonly used in computer systems that play board games.A bitboard, often used for boardgames such as chess, checkers and othello, is a specialization of the bitset data structure, where each bit represents a game position or state, designed for optimization of speed...

 data structure applied to the game of chess

Chess

Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...

.

In 1976, Chess 4.5 won the Class B section of the Paul Masson tournament in Northern California. The performance rating

Elo rating system

The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-born American physics professor....

 was 1950. This was the first time a computer was successful in a human tournament

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...

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In 1977, Chess 4.5 won the Minnesota Open winning five games and losing one. It had a performance rating of 2271. Stenberg (rated 1969) became the second Class A player to lose to a computer in a tournament game, the first being Jola.