Chess-Playing Computers and "Mechanized Thinking", 1950

 JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I was reading the great Claude Shannon's article, "A Chess-Playing Machine", in the Scientific American issue for February 1950 (volume 182, No. 2, pp 48-52). It is the first popular appearance of Shannon's technical paper (which would appear a month later in the Philosophical Magazine), and is one of the earliest appearances of an attempt to understand the necessities of a computer for playing a game of chess.

David Shenk in his wonderful The Import Game: a History of Chess sums up the background to the Shannon very nicely: 

“Since the mid-1940s, scientists had aimed to create a thinking machine, an apparatus that could compete with or even surpass the human brain in logical operations, pattern recognition, problem solving and even language. Chess was found to be a useful testing ground because of its combination of simple rules and mind-bending complexity… Shannon was fascinated by chess’ potential in the pursuit of what he called ‘mechanized thinking.’ But he became convinced that computer chess and other AI pursuits should not be modeled on human thought… Computers, at least as they were understood then, could calculate very quickly, following programmed instructions. This particular strength—and limitation—of computers suggested a different route for AI, a new sort of quasi-intelligence based on mathematical computation. Chess would be a central proving ground for this new type of intelligence. Theoretically, at least, the game could be fully converted into one long mathematical formula” --Shenk, pp 201, 211

“The father of the modern chess computer was MIT’s Claude Shannon, a mathematician regarded as the founder of information theory, who in 1950 published a paper called ‘Programming a Computer for Playing Chess. Shannon identified some of the algorithms and techniques that form the backbone of chess programs today.”--Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise

 

Notes

1. Philosophical Magazine, Series 7, Vol. 41, No. 314 - March 1950. XXII, "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess".

Full text:  http://vision.unipv.it/IA1/ProgrammingaComputerforPlayingChess.pdf

Also see a succinct article "History of Chess Computers" here: http://www.chessmaniac.com/history-of-chess-computers/

Image credit of Shannon:  http://ljkrakauer.com/LJK/60s/mitpeople.htm