By Mary Bellis
Dr. Dietrich Prinz wrote the original chess playing program for a general purpose computer (the Manchester Ferranti). The program first ran in November 1951. Prinz was a researcher at Manchester University in England where the groundbreaking Mark I, Mark II, the Ferranti Mk computers were designed and built.
Previously, special purpose machines designed only for playing chess had been invented. Dietrich Prinz was familiar with the chess-playing machine built by Torres y Quevedo. Prinz decided to work on the programming necessary to make a regular computer play chess.
The early computers of 1950s have little of the computing power or memory compared to modern computers. The limitations of a Mark series computer did not allow for a whole game of chess to be programmed. Prinz could only program mate-in-two problems. The program would examine every possible move until a solution was found and took an average of fifteen minutes to do so, today's computers can solve the same problem in a fraction of a second. However, for its time Prinz's program was a marvel.
The first checker-playing program was written by Christopher Strachey. It ran on the Ferranti Mark I in the Manchester Computing Machine Laboratory and was completed in 1952. Strachey was able to program an entire game of checkers, checkers being a much simpler game compared to chess.
Dr. Dietrich G. Prinz was born on 29 March, 1903. He was educated at Berlin University, where his teachers included Planck and Einstein, and graduated with a Ph.D. in Philosophy. He left Germany in 1935 and settled in England.
Prinz started working at Ferranti Ltd in 1947, and became involved in the firm's work with the Manchester Mark series of computers. Prinz was a programmer of the Manchester Mark I and the early Ferranti-Mark computers.
In 1957, a full-fledged chess program was written by Bernstein for an IBM 704 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1983, a chess program called Belle, designed at AT&T's Bell Laboratories, became the first to reach the U.S. master level of playing ability. In 1988, an IBM-designed program called Deep Thought, defeated one grand master and tied another.
Programming a Computer to Play Chess
Claude E. Shannon's 1949 Bell Labs report on just how a computer might play chess. This is the original history paper that started it all.
Computer Chess - Online
Resources for playing and programming computer chess.
Deep Blue Chess Master
Deep Blue is at heart a massively parallel, RS/6000 SP-based computer system that was designed to play chess at the grandmaster level.
Chess at About
Chess History
