Early Chess Programs at MIT
1957-1958	routines by John McCarthy John McCarthy (computer scientist) John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He coined the term "artificial intelligence" , invented the Lisp programming language and was highly influential in the early development of AI.McCarthy also influenced other areas of computing such as time sharing systems...  and Paul W. Abrahams	IBM 704 IBM 704 The IBM 704, the first mass-produced computer with floating point arithmetic hardware, was introduced by IBM in 1954. The 704 was significantly improved over the IBM 701 in terms of architecture as well as implementations which were not compatible with its predecessor.Changes from the 701 included...
1959-1962	Kotok Alan Kotok Alan Kotok was an American computer scientist known for his work at Digital Equipment Corporation and at the World Wide Web Consortium... -McCarthy John McCarthy (computer scientist) John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He coined the term "artificial intelligence" , invented the Lisp programming language and was highly influential in the early development of AI.McCarthy also influenced other areas of computing such as time sharing systems...	IBM 7090 IBM 7090 The IBM 7090 was a second-generation transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 vacuum tube mainframe computers and was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications". The 7090 was the third member of the IBM 700/7000 series scientific computers. The first 7090 installation...
1965-1967	The Greenblatt program (Mac Hack) MacHack (chess) Mac Hack is a computer chess program written by Richard D. Greenblatt. Also known as Mac Hac and ', it was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...	DEC Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...  PDP-6 PDP-6 The PDP-6 was a computer model developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1963. It was influential primarily as the prototype for the later PDP-10; the instruction sets of the two machines are almost identical.The PDP-6 was DEC's first "big" machine...

Kotok-McCarthy also known as A Chess Playing Program for the IBM 7090 Computer was the first computer program to play 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...

 convincingly. It is also remembered because it played in and lost the first chess match between two computer programs.

Development

Between 1959 and 1962, classmates Elwyn Berlekamp

Elwyn Berlekamp

Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp is an American mathematician. He is a professor emeritus of mathematics and EECS at the University of California, Berkeley. Berlekamp is known for his work in information theory and combinatorial game theory....

, Alan Kotok

Alan Kotok

Alan Kotok was an American computer scientist known for his work at Digital Equipment Corporation and at the World Wide Web Consortium...

, Michael Lieberman, Charles Niessen and Robert A. Wagner wrote the program while students of John McCarthy

John McCarthy (computer scientist)

John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He coined the term "artificial intelligence" , invented the Lisp programming language and was highly influential in the early development of AI.McCarthy also influenced other areas of computing such as time sharing systems...

 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

.

Building on Alex Bernstein's landmark 1957 program created at IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

 and on IBM 704

IBM 704

The IBM 704, the first mass-produced computer with floating point arithmetic hardware, was introduced by IBM in 1954. The 704 was significantly improved over the IBM 701 in terms of architecture as well as implementations which were not compatible with its predecessor.Changes from the 701 included...

 routines by McCarthy and Paul W. Abrahams, they added alpha-beta pruning

Alpha-beta pruning

Alpha-beta pruning is a search algorithm which seeks to decrease the number of nodes that are evaluated by the minimax algorithm in its search tree. It is an adversarial search algorithm used commonly for machine playing of two-player games...

 to minmax at McCarthy's suggestion to improve the plausible move generator. They wrote in Fortran

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

 and FAP on scavenged computer time. After MIT received a 7090

IBM 7090

The IBM 7090 was a second-generation transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 vacuum tube mainframe computers and was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications". The 7090 was the third member of the IBM 700/7000 series scientific computers. The first 7090 installation...

 from IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

, a single move took five to twenty minutes. By 1962 when they graduated, the program had completed fragments of four games at a level "comparable to an amateur with about 100 games experience". Kotok, at about age 20, published their work in MIT Artificial Intelligence Memo 41 and his bachelor's thesis.

Match with ITEP

In 1965, McCarthy, by then at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, visited the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

. A group using the M-2 computer at Alexander Kronrod

Alexander Kronrod

Aleksandr Semenovich Kronrod was a Soviet mathematician and computer scientist, best known for the Gauss-Kronrod quadrature formula which he published in 1964. Earlier his computations informed theoretical physics...

’s laboratory at the Moscow Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics

Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics

The Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics is located in Moscow, Russia as a MinAtom physical institute....

 (ITEP) challenged him to a match. Kronrod considered Kotok-McCarthy to be the best program in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 at the time. Although some of its faults were known in 1965 and were corrected in the Greenblatt program

MacHack (chess)

Mac Hack is a computer chess program written by Richard D. Greenblatt. Also known as Mac Hac and ', it was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...

 at MIT Project MAC, Kotok-McCarthy was no longer in development and was three years out of date.

Georgy Adelson-Velsky

Georgy Adelson-Velsky

Georgy Maximovich Adelson-Velsky , is a Soviet mathematician and computer scientist. Along with E.M. Landis, he invented the AVL tree in 1962....

, Vladimir Arlazarov

Vladimir Arlazarov

- Research work :In 1965 at Alexander Kronrod’s laboratory at the Moscow Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics , Vladimir Arlazarov co-developed the ITEP Chess Program, together with Georgy Adelson-Velsky, Anatoly Uskov and Alexander Zhivotovsky, advised by Russian chess master...

, Bitman, Anatoly Uskov and Alexander Zhivotovsky won the correspondence match

Correspondence chess

Correspondence chess is chess played by various forms of long-distance correspondence, usually through a correspondence chess server, through email or by the postal system; less common methods which have been employed include fax and homing pigeon...

 played by telegraph over nine months in 1966-1967. The Kotok-McCarthy program lost the match by a score of three to one and the first two games were played with a weak version. The ITEP group was advised by Russian chess master Alexander R. Bitman and three-time world champion Mikhail Botvinnik

Mikhail Botvinnik

Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik, Ph.D. was a Soviet and Russian International Grandmaster and three-time World Chess Champion. Working as an electrical engineer and computer scientist at the same time, he was one of the very few famous chess players who achieved distinction in another career while...

. According to the Computer History Museum

Computer History Museum

The Computer History Museum is a museum established in 1996 in Mountain View, California, USA. The Museum is dedicated to preserving and presenting the stories and artifacts of the information age, and exploring the computing revolution and its impact on our lives.-History:The museum's origins...

, McCarthy "used an improved version" in 1967 but what improvements were made is unknown.

Influence

In 1967 Mac Hack VI

MacHack (chess)

Mac Hack is a computer chess program written by Richard D. Greenblatt. Also known as Mac Hac and ', it was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...

 by Richard Greenblatt

Richard Greenblatt (programmer)

Richard D. Greenblatt is an American computer programmer. Along with Bill Gosper, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and holds a place of distinction in the Lisp and the MIT AI Lab communities.-Childhood:...

 with Donald E. Eastlake III became an honorary member of the United States Chess Federation

United States Chess Federation

The United States Chess Federation is a non-profit organization, the governing chess organization within the United States, and one of the federations of the FIDE. The USCF was founded in 1939 from the merger of two regional chess organizations, and grew gradually until 1972, when membership...

when a person lost to it in tournament play in Massachusetts

Massachusetts

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...

. Sadly, Kronrod lost his directorship at ITEP and his professorship because of complaints from physics users that ITEP mathematics resources were being used for gaming. Mikhail Donskoy, Arlazarov and Uskov developed the ITEP program into Kaissa

Kaissa

Kaissa was a chess program developed in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. It was named so after the chess goddess Caissa. Kaissa became the first world computer chess champion in 1974 in Stockholm.- History :...

at the Institute of Control Sciences and in 1974, it became the world computer chess champion

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...

. Debate continues some forty years after the first test, about whether the Shannon

Claude Elwood Shannon

Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electronic engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory"....

Type A brute force approach, used by ITEP, is superior to the Type B selective strategy, used by Kotok-McCarthy.