The laughing is over 1

For those of us involved in programming computers to play chess, it has been a great adventure. Our ACM annual tournaments began in 1970 – fifty years ago! – and were hosted year after year for a quarter century by the organization. They were terrific catalysts for progress in the field. They deserve major credit for the eventual 1997 defeat of the-then World Champion Garry Kasparov.

I feel human intelligence has been vastly overrated. We humans have not learned how not to fight needless wars over various explanations of how the universe or man came into being. The telescope that allows peering into the vast universe with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars is only four hundred years old. Women were burned alive as witches only three hundred years ago. With the universe apparently in existence for 14.7 billion years and the earth in existence for 4.6 billion years, and humans in existence for several million years, it seems that there is an excellent chance that at least one of the 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars may now and/or in the past have supported some sort of intelligent life. In particular, I suspect there might be creatures that are far, far more advanced than earthlings are. One of the great disappointments of my life is that we have not made greater efforts to explore the universe, especially our own moon and Mars.

Historically there have been all kinds of arguments supporting the belief that the other animals of this planet do not possess the mental capabilities of humans. For example, they were not thought to be able to use tools to solve problems, and they were not thought to be able to recognize themselves in a mirror. More and more we are finding that they are more intelligent than they have been given credit for.

Researchers in the field decided in the 1940s that chess was the task over which human intelligence might be studied. The definition of intelligence, of course, is problematic. How do we say someone is more intelligent than someone else? Chess provides an environment to study this. Ratings are assigned to chess players based on their performance against opposition. If one person consistently defeats another person, the former will be higher rated and can be considered more intelligent than the latter at playing chess. That, in part, was the motivation for using chess as a barometer of intelligence. There is also no luck involved as with many other games.

This brings us back to the game of chess and in particular the ACM’s role in it (Newborn, 1975). In 1970, the ACM’s Annual Conference took place at the New York Hilton in downtown Manhattan. Ken King, head of Columbia University’s computer center, served as co-chairman with me of the conference’s Special Events program. About the same time Tony Marsland, a Bell Telephone Laboratories researcher, approached me suggesting a demonstration of his chess-playing computer at the conference as a special event. We met, discussed this, and concluded we could put together something more exciting: the first chess tournament exclusively for computers. It was named the United States Computer Chess Championship. In addition, we included a computer music festival and a computer art festival in the program. These three events constituted our special events. I have forgotten of how the music and art festivals turned out. I do recall that Charles Dodge’s music involved transforming the intensity of, I believe, solar energy from the sun into musical notes, and the resulting music’s randomness was surprisingly delightful.

Marsland and I rounded up six contestants for the chess tournament. Hans Berliner, who had been the world-correspondence chess champion, was a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University at that time; he entered his program J. Biit. Ken King arranged for it to run on Columbia University’s powerful IBM 360/91 during the competition. Berliner’s program entered the tournament as the favorite to win. Three Northwestern University students, David Slate, Larry Atkin, and Keith Gorlen entered their program Chess 3.0. It ran on their university’s CDC 6400, a powerful machine but not in the same class as Columbia’s IBM 360/91. Marsland entered his program, The Marsland CP; it ran on a Burrough’s B5500 located in Burrough’s NYC Sales Office. Running on IBM 360/65s were two other entries, Coko III, developed by Dennis Cooper and Ed Kozdrowicki at Bell Telephone Laboratories’ Whippany facilities, and Schach, developed at Texas A&M by Franklin Ceruti and Rolf Smith, both Air Force captains at the time. Lastly, Chris Daly, working with Ken King (Not the same Ken King as Columbia’s Ken King) brought their computer, an IDIOM system based on a Varian 620/i processor, to the site. Three of the entrants used terminals directly connected to their remote computers, two others spoke over a telephone line to a remote human operator at their computers’ site, and one, as previously said, was at the site. Jacques Dutka, a mathematician known for calculating the square root of 2 to a million decimal digits (done after the tournament), served as tournament director. Missing from the competition was Mac Hack, developed at MIT by Richard Greenblatt. Mac Hack had established itself leading up to the tournament as most likely the strongest chess-playing program. It had competed in a number of human tournaments and was rated around 1600, the level of a good high school player.

So began a very significant and long-lasting experiment. Could a computer be designed to exhibit the intelligence of a chess expert, master, grandmaster, or world champion? Could one be designed to match the chess intelligence of the top human mind? What would it take? How long would it take? In 1970 there were no cell phones, no email, no drones, no self-driving cars, no Siri. However, the computer revolution was heating up!

Grandmasters were generally in denial in 1970. Some contended that good chess players used intuition when playing chess, and intuition could not be programmed. The programs were the laughing stock of the top chess players. That was the situation when the first ACM United States Computer Chess Championship was held.

The format of the championship was a three-round Swiss style tournament beginning August 31, 1970 and ending September 2, 1970. Entries had two hours to make their first 40 moves and then 30 minutes to make each successive ten moves. Bugs of all kinds cropped up as the competition went on with the most dramatic popping up in the early moves of the round 1 game between The Marsland CP (White) and J. Biit (Black). Marsland’s program made the worst possible 8th and 9th moves, leading to a quick victory for J. Biit, and laughter from the mixed audience of computer and chess experts. Attendees Grandmaster Pal Benko and International Master Al Horowitz may have been among those laughing.

In the next round, J. Biit was defeated by the Slate/Atkin/Gorlen program with the audience cheering Chess 3.0’s 47th move. That move involved a short-term sacrifice leading to an easier and shorter path to victory. Quite unlike the tournament hall of a human tournament, the audience was very vocal as the games progressed, cheering and laughing. Also unlike human tournaments, the programmers would usually get together for coffee after the games ended to discuss the day. A close community of programmers developed over the years.

Chess 3.0 went on to win the tournament winning all three games. It dominated the field for a decade until Ken Thompson’s Belle arrived in the late 1970s with special chess hardware (Levy & Newborn, 1991). Belle stayed on top until Bob Hyatt’s Cray Blitz and Hans Berliner’s Hitech caught up in the middle 1980s. In the late 1980s and early 1990s IBM’s Deep Blue, developed by Feng-Hsiung Hsu with major help from Murray Campbell, Joe Hoane and Jerry Brody, and with Chung-Jen Tan serving as boss, rose to the top of the pack (Newborn, 1997). Deep Blue was playing grandmaster-level chess. It went on to defeat Garry Kasparov in their classic 1997 match establishing a landmark in the world of artificial intelligence (Newborn, 2002). Incidentally, Tan and I go back to the late 1960s when he was a doctoral student at Columbia University, and I was a young professor there. We lived in the same Columbia apartment building at 560 Riverside Drive. We published several papers together in the field of automata theory, most prominently, one in the January 1970 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Computers entitled Iteratively Realized Sequential Circuits (Arnold et al., 1970).

Now a half century later, the top chess programs are so much better than the top humans that there is no contest (Newborn, 2011). The top players are using computers to help them learn to play better! The laughing has ended. Computers are, for round numbers, a thousand times faster than they were in 1970 and their memories are clearly more than 1000 times larger! That is hard to comprehend. Imagine driving a car that goes 1000 times faster than the one you currently drive! For example, a ten-mile drive to work at 60 miles an hour would take ten minutes, while at 60,000 miles per hour it would take less than a second: 0.06 seconds. Chess programs require, for each additional level of search, about four times the amount of time. A speedup of 1000 allows computers to search about five levels deeper ( 4 × 4 × 4 × 4 × 4 = 1024 ). That is a lot! On top of faster computers and much larger memories, there have been many software improvements and even different approaches all together, such as the recent use of Monte Carlo search.

Over the years, the ACM headquarters supported the yearly tournaments. I would like to single out two individuals in particular, Jim Adams and Joe DiBlasi. In addition, Drexel University professor Frank Friedman provided support as did Ben Mittman, head of Northwestern University’s Vogelback Computer Center. Lastly, British International Chess Master David Levy helped especially in setting up the 1996 Kasparov versus Deep Blue match.