History

1950

Claude E. Shannon writes Programming a Computer for Playing Chess (Philosophical Magazine 41:256-275), the first article on computer chess. Shannon describes two scenarios for chess programming. The principles laid out in the article are still followed by modern chess (and draughts) programs.

Shannon's scenarios: Type A: The program navigates through a "game tree" containing all possible combinations of moves up to a fixed "search depth" using a simple algorithm (which Shannon calls "minimax") in order to find the "best" move Type B: Only perform expansion of certain "interesting" lines, using knowledge to "prune" uninteresting branches of the tree.

Shannon advocated Type B as being closer to the way humans play chess. Debate still continues, although most modern leading programs are a hybrid of the two types.

1951
Alan Turing creates and simulates (performing the program's computations manually) a Type B computer chess program, which loses to a weak player.

1956
Type A program (for a simplified version of chess played on a 6x6 board) implemented on MANIAC-1 (11KHz (!), 600 words of memory (!!)) at Los Alamos. 4-ply search takes 12 minutes; beats weak players.

1957
Type B program implemented on IBM 704 (42KHz, 7K words). Plays complete chess; does 4-ply search in 8 minutes. Passable amateur.

1958
Newell, Simon and Shaw introduce alpha-beta pruning, a general tree-search technique which greatly reduces the work involved in tree search, thus enabling deeper search.

1959
Arthur Samuels experiments with automatic learning techniques to improve the play of a checkers program.

1962
Alan Kotok writes a chess program called MacHack for his MIT B.S. thesis project. Running on an IBM 7090, the program examines 1100 positions per minute.

1967
Greenblatt's chess program MacHack 6 on DEC PDP-6 (200KHz) evaluates about 10 positions per second. It competes in 4 amateur chess tournaments, wins 3 games, draws 3, loses 12.

1973
Until this point, most or all chess programs have been Type B. Slate and Atkin revise their program to use a Type A search routine for the 1973 Computer Chess Championships. Their program, Chess 4.0, wins comfortably, and other chess programmers start switching to type A.

1975
Robert Hyatt begins developing Cray Blitz, which was to become the world computer chess champion from 1983 - 1989. Hyatt is still very active in computer chess via his free program Crafty, for which source is available.

1977
Belle, the first special-purpose chess hardware is built by Condon and Thompson at Bell Labs. Chess 4.6 beats a grandmaster (Stean) at speed chess.

1979
Hans Berliner's BKG beats the world backgammon champion in a match.

1982
IAGO plays Othello at world-championship level (according to Jonathan Cerf, human world champion at the time), but does not actually play against championship level human competition.

1988
Deep Thought, predecessor of Deep Blue, created by a team of CMU undergraduate students. That same year, Deep Thought became the first computer to defeat a Grandmaster (Bent Larsen, a one-time contender for the world championship) in a tournament.

1992
Chinook (Jonathan Schaeffer's draughts program) loses a match to Marion Tinsley, the human world champion, 4-2 (with 33 draws).

1993
Deep Thought defeated Judit Polgar, at the time the youngest Grandmaster in history, and currently the strongest female player, in a two-game exhibition match.

1994
Tinsley forfeits match to Chinook due to illness. Chinook becomes world checkers champion.

1996
IBM's new chess machine Deep Blue (a 32-processor Parallel Sysplex with 256 VLSI chess engines searching up to 400 million moves per second (!) beats reigning champion Kasparov in the first game of a six-game match, but loses the match.

1997
Souped-up Deep Thought defeats Kasparov, although he did not play at his best.

2000
BB&D CFT Computer Draughts Challenge - look out Chinook!

(NB: this needs updating - google Hydra "computer chess" for reasons why!)