04 / A selective timeline
A long game of ideas.
From procedures on paper to specialist machines, home computers and learned evaluations.
Turochamp
Turing and Champernowne devise a chess procedure. The concept is a programme of instructions, not an original executable preserved for today’s browsers.
Explore further →Shannon puts chess on the computing agenda
Programming a Computer for Playing Chess discusses how a machine could search and evaluate positions. Turing’s imitation-game paper appears in the same year.
Explore further →Limited chess problems become executable
Dietrich Prinz’s Ferranti work tackles a restricted chess task. Early programs need not play a complete game to represent an important step.
Explore further →Experiments on real computers
The Los Alamos MANIAC experiments use a smaller 6 × 6 board. Distinguishing restricted chess from full-board play helps make sense of competing “first” claims.
Explore further →Research competitions and dedicated machines
Computer chess becomes a sustained engineering pursuit. Belle exemplifies specialist hardware; consumer chess boards bring electronic opponents into the home.
Explore further →Chess as a home-computer experience
Dedicated sets coexist with personal-computer games. Battle Chess turns captures into performances; Killer Chess experiments with simultaneous action.
Explore further →From Deep Thought to Deep Blue
The route to Deep Blue runs through specialist chess projects and a team of researchers and chess experts.
Explore further →A world champion loses the rematch
Deep Blue beats Kasparov 3½–2½ under standard tournament time controls.
Explore further →AlphaZero
Research explores self-play learning combined with neural-network-guided search across chess, shogi and Go.
Explore further →NNUE enters Stockfish
A learned evaluation becomes part of Stockfish’s search-based architecture. This is a change in how positions are valued, not the end of search.
Explore further →- Computer History Museum — First Tests ↗
- Computer History Museum — Brute Force vs Knowledge ↗
- Computer History Museum — Computer Chess Boards ↗
- IBM — Deep Blue: historical account ↗
- DeepMind — AlphaZero: shedding new light on chess, shogi and Go (2018) ↗
- Stockfish team — Introducing NNUE Evaluation (2020) ↗
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