In the last post of my computer chess series, we explored the development of early computing and chess under Alan Turing and colleagues in the late 40s and early 1950s. Here, the timeline of computing hits a period of exponential growth; by the mid 1950s, we saw the launch of the world's first commercial computer, and the establishment of Artificial Intelligence as an official research program. It was at the Dartmouth conference in 1956 where AI was solidified as a field; the 'Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence' brought together top mathematicians and scientists to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA for a summer brainstorming session, lasting some 6-8 weeks.
Dartmouth Conference 1956
The conference was organised by 'the father of AI' John McCarthy, a cognitive scientist known for coining the actual term 'Artificial Intelligence' in 1955.
John McCarthy
In 1957, seven years after Turing and Prinz developed their Ferranti Mark I computer that could play 'play-the-mate-in-two', two programs that could play a full game of chess were developed; the first by an IBM programming team led by Alex Bernstein based out of NYC, followed by a team in Russia using a BESM (a series of Soviet electronic computers developed in the 1950-60s).
Bernstein and chess board
Little is known about team leader Bernstein; he joined one year earlier in 1956 and attended the Dartmouth Conference. According to a conference report, "Alex Bernstein, who came from New York to talk about the chess-playing program when he played a game of chess with McCarthy the equivalent of mano in the world of science Bernstein won, despite the fact that he'd accepted the handicap of playing blindfold. After that he produced a program to beat McCarthy when he got back to New York. Because he realized that his visit to Dartmouth didn't coincide with that of Newell and Simon, he discovered only later that he and they had arrived independently at some of the same ideas for the problem". In John McCarthy's memoirs, he recalls, "Alex Bernstein of IBM presented his chess program under construction. My reaction was to invent and recommend to him alpha-beta pruning. He was unconvinced."
According to some sources, Bernstein had a strong understanding of chess, and was the captain the Bronx High School chess team. He recounted his chess experience as such:
"I started playing chess seriously, I guess, when I was in high school. I played chess so much that it affected my grades in college. One year I played chess to the exclusion of everything else and woke up at the end of the term and discovered I had failed two courses. I was going to City College at the time. I failed a physics course and a math course— theory of functions of real variables. It was quite a shock and I gave up chess after that term. I suppose I continued reading about it, but I stopped playing chess."
His interest in chess was renewed when he was hired at IBM, and encouraged by a colleague to combine their interests and expertise in both computers and chess to develop a chess-playing program.
A 5mb hard drive at IBM in 1957
Although his colleague was soon transferred to a different IBM lab, Bernstein was intrigued by the idea of creating the chess program, and was given permission by his IBM manager to essentially spend half of his work and computer time on the project. He drew upon not only his previous obsession with chess, but also studied 'Modern Chess Openings', the reference book first published in England in 1911. British Grandmaster Harry Golombek later described it as "the first scientific study of the openings in the twentieth century". The MCO was published at various dates over 15 editions to date; it is likely that Bernstein would have worked with the 1952 MCO-8 edition, edited by chess author Walter Korn. Berstein spent six months studying some 500 openings and developing a scoring system for various positions depending on piece count, piece mobility and the area of the board under control.
Modern Chess Openings
But Bernstein was struggling. After six months he had made little actual progress, and became aware that many others, including John McCarthy, were working on similar projects at other institutions and companies. He decided to continue studying openings, and became aware of Alan Turing's papers from the 1950s, which he read with relish. But the most important book he credits with aiding his development was My System by Aron Nimzowitsch, an iconic chess book that every serious chess player should own.
My System by Nimzowitsch
Nimzowitsch was an early twentieth-century Russian chess master who had revolutionized modern chess principles, a pioneer of the Hypermodern school of chess. The Hypermodern school of chess opposed the classical and traditional principles of chess, by aiming to attack the centre from the sides, a concept previously ignored. Instead of focusing on making initial gains in the centre of the board, he believed that a delayed strategy of imbalance and strong points can win the game. This sparked something in Bernstein's thinking, and several phone calls and a short-but-fruitful visit to MIT later, with three colleagues, Bernstein created his chess program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It ran on an IBM 704, one of the last vacuum tube computers. It took about eight minutes to make a move.
At last, Bernstein's research, passion for chess and expertise for computers appeared to have paid off. But was his program a success, or would the machine get the better of its master? Find out in part 2 of my blog on Alex Bernstein's Computer Chess Program, published next month!