Preface  vii

1 Did Someone Say Ten Years?  1

An overview of the most conspicuous branch of artificial intelligence, machine chess, in which a breakthrough is always expected within a decade; a synopsis of the book. 

2  The Rise of Mechanical Automata  15 

Von Kempelen's 1769 "Turk" takes on all comers at chess; Charles Babbage designs an Analytic Engine; Torres y Quevedo builds an electro-mechanical endgame machine.  

3  B.P.  23

A group of chess players and mathematicians at a secret British wartime facility build machines to crack ciphers and, for recreation, design chess machines. 

4  Minimax  37   

Assigning values to chess positions allows comparison of alternative branches of a move tree; Claude Shannon describes Alan Turing tests, and first programs run. 

5  Brute Force  53 

Amateur's chess knowledge proves codifiable, the chess master's does not; knowledge-based machines yield to brute-force computation; computer tournaments become a spectator sport.

6  Human Intuition  73

Humans are poor calculators, but exploit brain's pattern recognition to play terrific chess; psychologists show expertise is result of trained intuition. 

7  Human Versus Machine  85 

John Henry beats the steam drill, David Levy conquers CHESS 4.7, and Garry Kasparov outplays Deep Thought; calculating amateurs lose while intuitive masters win. 

8  Custom-Built Hardware  103 

Chess machines on a chip and custom-built circuitry amplify brute-force capability. 

9   Computable Subgame  119

Human theoretical knowledge of chess increases through machine-assisted computation; exact endgame computations provide unexpected results. 

10  Machine Learning  131

It ain't smart if it always makes the same mistakes; some machines learn from esxperience; others induce rules from examples, and can acquire intuitive knowledge. 

11  Machine Intuition  149 

Computing devices coupled to an environment mimic neural systems for intuitive information processing and offer hope for knowledge-based chess machinery. 

Appendix A:    Chess Notation  157 

Appendix B:    Torres y Quevedo's Mating Algorithm  159 

Appendix C:    Recursive Programming and the Minimax Algorithm  161 

References   163 

Author Index  169 

Subject Index  171