Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
The ACM tournament became an annual event and ran for 24 years.
These tournaments, and other computer versus computer events, includ-
ing the triennial 12 World Computer Chess Championship, had a deci-
sive influence in the rate of improvement in the playing strength of the
best programs. The programmers would sit at the chessboard, typing
the moves of their opponent's program into their own computer and
making their own program's moves on the board. During the gaps be-
tween moves the programmers would chat to each other in a friendly
atmosphere, very unlike human tournaments, and would often exchange
ideas on Chess programming. In this way the programmers would learn
from each other and by studying the play of other programs. At the
end of one year's tournament the programmers would retreat to their
ivory towers and return the next year with a stronger program. Thus was
progress made, year by year.
In August 1978, at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto,
I played a six-game match to determine the outcome of my bet. My
opponent was the Northwestern University program, the reigning World
Computer Chess Champion, now called Chess 4.7. During the match I
sat, dressed in a tuxedo, in a soundproof glass box, facing a young lady
who made the program's moves on the chessboard and pressed its button
on the chess clock (see Figure 23 ).
I managed to beat the program fairly convincingly, by three wins to
one with one game drawn (the sixth game did not need to be played),
and with this match I won my bet.
When sending me his cheque John McCarthy wrote that, when he
made the bet, he had expected I would lose to an intelligent program. But
because the leading programs of the day used the “brute force” approach
(searching very large trees with very little Chess intelligence), rather than
the “selective search” approach (searching very small trees with a lot of
Chess intelligence), McCarthy said that he did not mind losing the bet.
In 1980 Ken Thompson's program BELLE, co-developed with Joe
Condon at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, won the World Computer
Chess Championship which was held in Linz, Austria. By then BELLE
was very different from other Chess-playing computer systems—it relied
for its strength on the speed it acquired from special-purpose computer
hardware that was designed specifically to play Chess. Thompson had
concluded that “...computer Chess belonged to the fastest computer”
12 This has since become an annual event.
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