The arrival of the two world wars and subsequently of the Cold War gave the game a different connotation: chess stopped being a simple intellectual sport to transform itself into a real political battle. The 1950s and 1960s saw absolute domination by players from the Soviet Union such as Botvinnik and Tal. Between 1951 and 1969 all the world champions were Soviet citizens and two tournaments called "The Soviet Union against the rest of the world" were organized. In these two competitions the USSR faced a team of international players and won both times. Despite this climate of turmoil, chess was included in the Olympics until 2000, and even then as a mere exhibition and not as a competition. Since it was introduced in Europe, chess has followed different paths for men and women, sometimes even in the way it is played: there were clubs and tournaments separated by gender, even with different rules. The game of correspondence chess became particularly popular among the ladies and aristocracy. One of them, who signed with the simple pseudonym "a Lady", published the manual The ABC of Chess in 1860. The Soviet Union promoted a professionalization of female chess players which soon spread throughout the world. However, a third intelligence was about to come into play: artificial intelligence. The first chess program capable of playing a fair game was MacHack VI, developed in 1967 by a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The program tied once with its human opponent; the other four were defeated. But just twenty years later, the programs were already advanced enough to defeat most professional players.
In 1997 a computer program, IBM Deep Blue, won a chess tournament against world champion Garri Kasparov
1996 marked a before and after in chess history: on February 10, the IBM Deep Blue program won a game against world champion Garri Kasparov, although the Russian ended up winning the tournament with three wins, two draws and one loss . Just one year later the IBM Deep Blue took first place in the same tournament with two wins, one loss and three draws. Since this sequence of articles on the history of chess is over I was thinking of doing some on the history of each world champion. One more thing, in the previous article I got the name of the club wrong. The club is called: Blog of Luca-2011 Club.
