Asri-unix.143
net.chess
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix!mclure
Wed Nov 25 14:57:17 1981
John McCarthy and computer chess
As many of you know, the first major computer chess games were played
between a Soviet program and a Stanford program supervised by John
McCarthy, and written by a student (I forget his name). I had a chance
to have an extensive discussion over a Chinese dinner with Professor
McCarthy a few days ago about his interests in computer chess. He had
a few amusing comments.
He became dissatisfied with the current direction when less and less
"AI" was put into programs, and instead the programs leaned toward brute
force. This is quite true; however it appears that the brute force method
may have recently hit a brick wall (according to Thompson) in playing strength.
CRAY BLITZ and BELLE are just barely masters, and even that may be questionable
when masters begin to study their past games. It seems that the current methods
produce extremely good tactical play, with full-width lookahead 7-8 ply in the
middle game, rapidly increasing in depth as pieces are exchanged. My own view
is that there will be a world computer champion in 25-40 years (Thompson thinks
25-30), which will incorporate this tactical play with an extremely large
database of tens/hundreds of thousands of chess patterns, which will be used
to trim the search tree and increase the depth enormously.
McCarthy offered a $10 bet to the person who came up with the shortest win
against the Chess Challenger 7 (a rathermediocre player); one person gave
him a 6 move win.
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