Alan Turing and David Champernowne became friends when they were both studying mathematics at King's College, Cambridge. They were both good chess players and in 1948 they wrote a computer program to play chess. The program was called Turochamp and Champernowne said about it: "Most of our attention went to deciding which moves were to be followed up. My memory about this is infuriatingly weak, Captures had to be followed up at least to the point where no further captures was immediately possible. Check and forcing moves had to be followed further. We were particularly keen on the idea that whereas certain moves would be scorned as pointless and pursued no further others would be followed quite a long way down certain paths. In the actual experiment I suspect we were a bit slapdash about all this and must have made a number of slips since the arithmetic was extremely tedious with pencil and paper. Out general conclusion was that a computer should be fairly easy to program to play a game of chess against a beginner and stand a fair chance of winning or least reaching a winning position." There were no machines to execute or test Turochamp when it was invented. Thus, to test it, Turing acted as a human CPU. Turochamp lost to Alick Glennie(Turing's colleague) in 1952 and the game was recorded . Turochamp won against Champernowne's wife who was a beginner at playing chess. Turochamp incorporated important methods of evaluation as well as the concepts of selectivity and dead position. As soon as the Ferranti Mark 1 computer was constructed, Turing started to implement Turochamp at Machester University, but he never finished it. In 2012, the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov played a game of chess against Turochamp live on stage at The University of Manchaster's Alan Turing Centenary Conference. Turochamp was designed to play two moves ahead, whereas Kasparov often considers at least ten moves ahead and hence he won the game with 16 moves. Nonetheless, he praised Turing’s research saying: “I suppose you might call it primitive, but I would compare it to an early car – you might laugh at them but it is still an incredible achievement."
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |