Introduction
You would be forgiven for not thinking of chess as a headline-grabbing sport. However, since the Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit” became a hit, chess has captured the imaginations of millions. More recently, chess competitions and accusations of cheating have made headlines.
As the sport is dealing with those recent controversies, chess engines are taking advantage of recent advances in technology to make their mark.
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What is a chess engine?
A simple way of thinking of a chess engine is to imagine a combination of chess boards and a powerful computer. The word ‘engine’ describes software programs that are capable of playing and analyzing chess. The engine is the technology behind what you see on the screen. It is the power that searches for and processes potential candidate moves on the board.
As computer technology has taken leaps forward over the past two decades, chess engines have transformed, too.
When were chess engines invented?
Experts believe that chess has been played for almost 2,000 years. Compared to that, the history of chess engines is much shorter. Still, the earliest attempt at creating a chess engine is over 200 years old. That may sound impressive – until you realize that 1796’s “Automaton” was a fake. A leading human player hid inside the so-called engine and played others.
The next milestone in chess engine development took until the early 1950s when codebreaker and programmer Alan Turing developed software that really could play this zero-sum game. Over the following decades, other programmers continued using different command-line interfaces to finetune the concept and improve chess engines until they could beat humans.
One of the most high-profile examples of this is the 1996 and 1997 series of matches between IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue and Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. When Deep Blue won the second match of this series of six, the computer made history in the world of chess.
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How have chess engines affected human play?
Chess engines have raised the game for human players. Ever since chess programs became powerful enough to draw with or even beat human players, they also became training tools. Traditionally, human players have learned and improved their skills by analyzing the moves of their peers. Understanding the strategies applied by grandmasters helped budding players sharpen their game of chess.
Chess engines have allowed human players to accelerate their progress, by adding a different level of understanding and knowledge to the game. Today, one of the main purposes of chess engines is to act as training tools. They allow players at any level to generate ideas and analyze specific chess positions. The idea is to be able to review more options for play in less computing time than humans could on their own.