History of Chess Engines
History of Chess Engines Programming a Computer for Playing Chess (1950) by Claude Shannon is the foundational paper of computer chess and one of the earliest works in artificial intelligence. Written at a time when programmable computers were still experimental, the paper does not attempt to build a chess program, but instead asks a deeper question: what would it even mean for a machine to play chess intelligently under severe computational limits? Shannon shows that perfect play is theoretically possible but practically impossible, and develops a principled framework based on approximate evaluation, game-tree search, selectivity, and bounded rationality. Nearly every major idea used in modern chess engines—minimax, heuristic evaluation, quiescence, selective search, opening books, randomness, and even learning—appears here in conceptual form. The paper remains important not as a historical curiosity, but because it correctly identifies the permanent constraints and core ideas that still govern strong chess-playing programs today. ...