Ramblings about stuff

Here follows nostalgic ramblings about chess computers.  You have been warned.

By around 1981, I had been already been playing in chess tournaments for a couple of years.  I remember one tournament where, in the same weekend, I came across two new interesting pieces of technology, both of which were fascinating in different ways.

The tournament was held in a school and, in the school hall there was the first Space Invaders machines I’d seen.  With its now-famous descending bassline theme tune and the gradually increasing pace of the tiny, sprite-like aliens, this was enchanting.  Just 10p a go, too.  Annoyingly, I seem to recall that all the best chess players were also the best at Space Invaders.

The second piece of technology was a chess computer.  I’d never seen one before and, to be honest, I’m don’t think I realised they existed.  Bear in mind that this was the very early days of computers as we now understand them: there may have been a BBC Micro at school, but no-one yet had home computers.  That followed only about two years later, when geeky children were defined by whether they had a ZX Spectrum (Speccy), a Commodore (The Other Lot) or a BBC Micro (parents with money to burn).  The chess computer was set up on a table in the tournament’s analysis room and there was quite a large crowd of children and their parents looking on.  I’ve googled around and I think that the machine was probably one of these:

It was a Chess Challenger 7 and could play a game well enough to be a reasonable match for most of the younger children at the tournament (played to around 100 BCF I think).  As such it was considered an interesting educational toy, but many of the much stronger chess-playing parents were rather dismissive.  That would turn out to be a short-sighted view.  Just sixteen years later, a computer would beat the World Chess Champion in a six-game match.  But I’m getting ahead of myself…  To play against the Chess Challenger you pressed the pieces on the board to indicate the move you wanted to play.  Chess Challenger would indicate its reply by displaying its move on the display.  Nice and simple.

A year or two later, I had my own chess computer (and a Speccy, of course).  I had a Conchess machine, like this:

This was a great machine for me.  It was much stronger than the Chess Challenger and was suitable for helping me improve.  The nice feature about this machine was that you didn’t need to press the squares to make your move: you just lifted the piece off its source square and placed it on its destination square: magnets in the base of each piece triggered switches under the surface of each square.  The computer would indicate its reply by lighting up LEDs on the appropriate squares.  I got a huge amount of use out of this one and I’m sure it was indirectly responsible for me winning a handful of club tournaments in the mid/late 1980s.  The machine played up to a level of around 130 on the BCF scale, which was just enough to stretch me at that stage.

For those of you who see chess-playing software on PCs, mobile phones and so on now, it may seem strange to have a dedicated piece of hardware simply to play chess.  The reason for this was simple: first of all, PCs and mobile phones didn’t exist then and the chess-playing software on home computers (such as on a Speccy) was not very strong, simply because the processors were very slow.  Chess computers need to search hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of moves in order to play good chess: this just wasn’t possible in software.  Dedicated chess chips were required, hence dedicated chess hardware.

In the 1990s, the ‘dedicated chess hardware’ approach was taken its ultimate limit with the creation of Deep Blue by IBM.  This was the size of two standard modern computer racks (size of a wardrobe) packed with dedicated chess-processing chips.  This machine played two six-game matches against the World Chess Champion (then Garry Kasparov): in 1996, Garry won 4-2.  In 1997, an improved version of Deep Blue got its revenge.  So the educational toy of 1981 had become, ultimately, a world beater.  This is Kasparov playing Deep Blue in 1997:

Fast forward another ten years or so… Now you can download - for free - software for your mobile phone which would wipe Deep Blue (and all human chess players) off the board!  This is become possible due to a combination of factors, but largely due to increased processor speeds and well-written software.  Chess computer software of this sort is now used to analyse games to find The Right Move, to find out where you went wrong in your games.   Or the computer deliberately limits its playing ability so that humans have a chance!  In 1981, the computer’s moves would have been laughed at.  Now, they are considered authoritative, without question.  Even during the Deep Blue matches, Garry Kasparov said “In some positions, the computer plays like God.”