Computer chess

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Chess enthusiasts and computer engineers have attempted to build, with increasing degrees of seriousness and success, chess-playing machines since 1769. Motivations can essentially be consolidated into two: firstly, to build a machine to play chess with for solo entertainment, and secondly, to investigate chess as a problem which might provide some insight into human cognition. In this view, the history of computer chess is both a spectacular success and a virtually complete failure.

Chess-playing computers are available for negligible cost, and there are many programs (even the free GNU Chess, Amy, Pepito, Crafty, and more) that play a game that, with the aid of virtually any modern personal computer can defeat most master players under tournament conditions, while top commerical programs like Fritz have surpassed even world champion caliber players at blitz and short time controls.

However, to the surprise and disappointment of many, chess has taught us little about building machines that offer human-like intelligence, or indeed do anything except play excellent chess. For this reason, computer chess, (as with other games, like Scrabble) is no longer of great academic interest to researchers in artificial intelligence, and has largely been replaced by more intuitive games like igo as a testing paradigm. Chess-playing programs essentially explore huge numbers of potential future moves by both players and apply a relatively simple evaluation function to the positions that result where as a game like igo challenges programmers to consider conceptual approaches to play.

The brute-force methods are useless for most other problems artificial intelligence researchers have tackled, and are believed to be very different from how human chess players select their moves. In some strategy games, computers easily win every game, while in others they are regularly beaten even by amateurs.

Therefore, the fact that the best efforts of chess masters and computer engineers are as of 2003 so finely balanced should probably be viewed as an amusing quirk of fate rather than the profound comment on thought that many in the past, including some of the early theorists on machine intelligence, thought it to be.

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