Building on Alex Bernstein's landmark 1957 program[2] created at IBM and on IBM 704 routines by McCarthy and Paul W. Abrahams, they added alpha-beta pruning to minmax at McCarthy's suggestion to improve the plausible move generator. They wrote in Fortran and FAP on scavenged computer time. After MIT received a 7090 from IBM, 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".[3] Kotok, at about age 20, published their work in MIT Artificial Intelligence Memo 41 and his bachelor's thesis.[3]
Georgy Adelson-Velsky, Vladimir Arlazarov, Bitman, Anatoly Uskov and Alexander Zhivotovsky won the correspondence match played by telegraph over nine months in 1966-1967. The Kotok-McCarthy program lost the match by a score of three to one[5] and the first two games were played with a weak version.[7] The ITEP group was advised by Russian chess master[citation needed] Alexander R. Bitman and three-time world champion Mikhail Botvinnik.[8] According to the Computer History Museum, McCarthy "used an improved version"[9] in 1967 but what improvements were made is unknown.
Influence
In 1967 Mac Hack VI[10] by Richard Greenblatt with Donald E. Eastlake III became an honorary member of the United States Chess Federation[citation needed] when a person lost to it in tournament play in Massachusetts. 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[citation needed] at the Institute of Control Sciences and in 1974, it became the world computer chess champion.[11]Debate continued[12] some forty years after the first test, about whether the Shannon[13] Type A brute force approach, used by ITEP, is superior to the Type B selective strategy, used by Kotok-McCarthy.[7] The success of programs such as Northwestern University's Chess 4.5, which used the Type A strategy,[14][15] however, led to the Type A strategy being favored, at least for projects where playing strength, and not insight into human thought processes, was the goal.[16] Recently, however, chess programs which make use of neural networks to evaluate positions, such as Giraffe, Alpha Chess Zero and Leela Chess Zero, make use of Monte Carlo Tree Search in order to allow a deeper search by not evaluating every position.
^ abE.M. Landis, I.M. Yaglom, Remembering A.S. Kronrod, English translation by Viola Brudno. W. Gautschi (ed.) [written for Uspekhi Matematicheskikh Nauk, English publication Math. Intelligencer (2002), 22-30], available at Stanford University School of Engineering SCCM-00-01Archived 2007-06-13 at the Wayback Machine (PostScript). Retrieved on 19 December 2006
^Photo: John McCarthy, artificial intelligence pioneer, playing chess at Stanford's IBM 7090, Unknown photographer. Courtesy of Stanford University. (1967). "Computer History Museum accession number L062302006". Retrieved 2006-12-22.
^Greenblatt, Richard D., Eastlake, Donald E. III, and Crocker, Stephen D. (1969). "The Greenblatt Chess Program"(PDF). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2017-07-06. Retrieved 2006-07-01. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
Kotok, Alan (June 1962). A chess playing program for the IBM 7090 (Thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering. hdl:1721.1/17406.
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) (n.d.). "A Chess Playing Program (AIM-41)". Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CSAIL Digital Archive - Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Series. Archived from the original on 2006-09-13. Retrieved 2006-12-24.