Chess Skill in Man and Machine

1 A brief history of the computer chess tournaments: 1970–1975.- Background.- The tournaments.- The Soviet Union vs. USA match, 1966–67.- First United States computer chess championship (New York, 1970).- KAISSA vs. the Soviet Public (Moscow, 1972).- First world computer chess championship (Stockholm, 1974).- Fifth United States computer chess championship (San Diego, 1974).- Sixth North American computer chess championship (Minneapolis, 1975).- Significance.- 2 Human chess skill.- Should a computer be more like a man?.- The choice-of-move problem.- The role of perception.- The first few seconds.- Search through the tree of moves.- Visualizing positions.- Evaluation.- Motivation.- The road to mastery for man and machine.- 3 An introduction to computer chess.- Machine representation of the chess board.- Static evaluation functions.- The look-ahead procedure.- Backward pruning.- Quiescence.- Plausible-move generators.- Full-width searching.- The opening.- The endgame.- Improvement through competition.- Future prospects.- 4 CHESS 4.5—The Northwestern University chess program.- Background.- The development of CHESS 4.0.- Data base.- Move generation.- Tree-searching strategy.- The evaluation function.- Tree searching in CHESS 4.5.- Program performance.- Conclusions and perspective.- 5 PEASANT: An endgame program for kings and pawns.- The rules of play.- A description of the program.- The program–s performance.- Final observations.- 6 Plans, goals, and search strategies for the selection of a move in chess.- Search strategies.- Search strategies in the movement of the pieces.- A program to play speed chess.- 7 The heuristic search: An alternative to the alpha-beta minimax procedure.- 8 Man and machine: Chess achievements and chess thinking.- Why program a computer toplay chess?.- Past achievements of computer-chess programs.- Chess thinking: Man versus machine.- Computer chess: Omens, prospectives, and values.- Concluding comments.- 9 Belle.- Background.- Chess-specific hardware.- Second generation.- Third generation.- The book.- An experiment.- Conclusion.- 10 Using chess knowledge to reduce search.- Overview of PARADISE.- Concepts and knowledge sources.- Plans.- Creating plans.- How detailed should plans be?.- Using plans to guide the search.- A typical medium-sized search.- Measuring PARADISE’S performance.- Summary and long-term prospects.- Appendix Chess 4.5: Competition in 1976.- The Paul Masson American Chess Championship.- ACM Computer Chess Championships, 1976.- Second Appendix Chess 4.5 and Chess 4.6: Competition in 1977 and 1978.- The Minnesota Open, February, 1977.- The First Wager Match with Levy, April, 1977.- The Second World Computer Championship, August, 1977.- Blitz Chess against Michael Stean in London, September, 1977.- Twin-Cities Open, April, 1978.- Walter Browne Simultaneous Exhibition, May, 1978.- Appendix to the second edition.- References and bibliography.