The evolution of Chess Engines

As many of us know Stockfish is the best chess engine currently many of us don't know the history of chess engines. I will be taking you from the first chess engine in the world to the best engine currently.

The first Chess Engine(well maybe)

In 1770, the Mechanical Turk was created by a German writer and inventor named Wolfgang Von Kempelen. It was like a real-life human being like a Turk-like wizard figure with a smoking pipe and a resting pillow. As many would say this is ahead of the time, but this wasn't a real chess computer, a person behind it was playing for it so it wasn't the awesome mindblowing thing that destroyed chess intellectuals, it was just a person playing for it. It later got burned in a fire and only half of it was still intact, then a model of it was built in 1984 but this time it was an actual engine playing as a human mind wasn't needed anymore because of the new technology.

As Sun-Tzu would say if there is a new chess engine released in 1770 it should always play Napoleon Bonaparte so here is a game where Napoleon Bonaparte(White) played the Turk!! (Black)(Operated by Johann Allgaier).

World War II and Chess

World War II would lead to astonishing breakthroughs in technology, the largest of these of course is the computer. Two men known as Alan Turing and Claude Shannon pioneered the depths of computing and at the end of World War II, nearing the 1950s they both had an interest in programming chess engines. In 1950, Claude Shannon would publish a paper detailing a program potentially play chess against a human. A year later, Alan Turing would create the first computer chess-playing algorithm, but the hardware lacked power at the time, and both of them laid the foundation for the rise of chess engines. 

Alex Bernstein

In 1957, Alex Bernstein created the first fully functional chess engine that can play a game from start to finish, taking an average of 8 minutes per move. This engine was built for IBM 704 mainframe

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1960s and 70s

Chess engines failed to compete with the top players of the time.
In 1978, a chess engine named Belle won the North American Computer Chess Championship, it could analyze up to 30 million positions in 3 minutes. Belle would be the first engine to receive the Master rating 3 years later.

The Rise of Deep Blue

A chess engine, to many known as a breakthrough between humans and computers, Deep Blue wasn't named Deep Blue at the time rather it was named ChipTest, this computer was invented by 3 people named, Feng Hsiung Hsu, Thomas Anandtharaman, and Murray Campbell. The engine played in the North American Computer Chess Championship in 1986 but lose to stronger bots, but in 1987 it was improved and won the competition with 4-0. They would develop a new engine named Deep Thought in 1988, this engine is the first engine to beat a grandmaster. Deep Thought would continue to win the World Computer Chess Championship with a 5-0 win. It would also face the famous world champion at the time, please give a drumroll to Garry Catsparrov *cough cough* Kasparov!!!! but the engine lost both games it played against him. A few years later it was changed to Deep Thought 2 and it was the Computer Chess Champion, it also won its fifth North American Computer Chess Championship in the 1990s. Finally, in 1995, the Deep Blue project was started and released by IBM in 1996, in the same year it would play against Garry Kasparov.

1st Game

Deep Blue ends off with a 1-0 lead against Garry Kasparov

But Kasparov strikes back with a victory the next day as white

Up two pawns in a opposite colored bishop endgame is sometimes a win and this time it favored Kasparov

Game 3 -- A Peaceful Draw In a 3 pawn vs 3 in a rook endgame

As of now 3 games have been played both players having 1.5/3.

In the next game there was another draw because neither player could make any progress

Game 5 is where the tragedy struck for the Deep Blue team. In a dead draw Deep Blue(White) slowly decreased the chances of a draw and made it to a losing position leading it to resign against Black.

Game 6

After game 5 the standing are 3-2, where Garry Kasparov has a one point lead against the Computer. This game could decide if the competition would be drawn or lost for Deep Blue so it had to win, with black

Garry Kasparov won with a 2 point by freezing Deep Blue's pieces allowing no progress to be made. But this is the first time a computer has beaten the world champion!!!

Rematch

The following year Deep Blue got a chance to play Garry Kasparov again this time dominating the board 3.5 against 2.5, this would mark the era where chess computers became stronger than humans.

Present

For a few decades engine growth has been slowing down but still was getting stronger than ever before, until in 2017 a group of Google engineers called DeepMind created AlphaZero which was astonishing in strength beating Stockfish, at the time and still the best engine, AlphaZero and Stockfish played 100 games and AlphaZero one 28 and managed to draw 72. After this Stockfish took the lead as the strongest engine till now. Many other engines such as Lc0 and Komodo, also became very strong. Currently Stockfish passed 3600 elo in the FIDE ranking scale and is well past Magnus Carlsen and other chess masters.

Future

In the future there will be more chess engines even stronger than ever where it will be literally impossible for any human to even draw with it.