How computers play Chess and how Algorithms help it…
Tags: Chess, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Blue, Computers

This era is an era of computers.

Computers have played an important role in modelling of the 21st

century, but we have to admit that behind the success of the computer’s

speed and efficiency there are hands of engineers, scientists, people

who had gathered together and made it possible. Today a computer

is capable of heavy computation which is used in physics, meteorology-

forecasting weather, in astrophysics, playing an important role in

the Internet, for providing security in online transactions, in content

creation, as a tool for various services, in social connections, etc.

There is perhaps a concerned role of computer, that has been researched

for decades and also is supposed to prove that computers might be smarter

than humans(which of course they are not till now but have only great speed

in computing. computers can only perform computing tasks as arithmetic, logical and comparison based tasks only), is what if computers played chess?

The idea here is that to develop an algorithm that computes the move

for a chess piece wisely throughout the game and supposedly wins the game.

But there is lot to consider as an example the chess board is 8 By 8

tiles that is 64 total tiles so there may be 64!(1.2688693218588416410343338933516e+89)

combinations possible and there are 16 pieces and each piece has its own

possible locations. So despite having high computation speed the

computers are still slow for finding out the best solution.

But Of course they can compute it eventually in couple of decades, so

as the time that is way more than a usual game would even last, it is

not practical.

let’s go in deeper, consider the computer has to place the queen in next

optimal place in the board, so the computer would go through each and every

possible place where it can go from the current possible location and

also check if it gets killed at that position by any enemy piece in next

move. Now it may seem easy but again, math here. Lets assume that queen

has 10 choices therefore it has to check for enemy’s attack on every

choice out of 10 that is every n pieces that enemy has that is n!. That’s

a lot of time.

The idea of computer playing chess came way back in 1900’s . When the

computers were lot less powerful and initially they were mechanical. Several

scientist dedicated their work only to develop the algorithm by which the

computer was able to play the chess with given limited resources. Until the

year 1996 when IBM made DEEP BLUE machine which won a single match (1 out of six, three won by Garry, 2 draw) against Garry Kasparov(World champion at that time). This proved that the computers are capable to defeat humans at chess under the time constraints. IBM then Upgraded DEEP Blue heavily and again in 1977 the Deep Blue won the series against Garry to become first computer to ever defeat a human in chess. It was fascinating that

it had the power of computing 200million positions per second and was ranked 259th supercomputer.

The view here is not to show that computers are powerful than human beings as we are the ones who created it and run it and are the brains behind each and every single aspect of it, but rather to the effectiveness of

Artificial intelligence and how it will be useful in the future. As chess is a NP problem( NP as in Non polynomial time in result as in exponential time needed) it is a good field to make computers play chess in P time (Polynomial time) by using artificial Intelligence.