Artificial Intelligence, 12 (1), 23-40.

It can be seen that a great deal of worthwhile material has now been generated about computer chess. There is also quite a bit of nonsense by persons who have never built a program. Several groups with excellent programs have done little publishing, although I can hardly blame them since their work requires much time and is usually unsupported by any funding agencies. Certain staples have given rise to duplication: All but one of the books published explain the depth-first alpha-beta procedure. We expect that by far the largest portion of our readers will be scientists interested in updating their knowledge of the subject.

IJCAI 5, 975-979

Proc. IJCAI 77 VOL 1 MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, USA AUGUST 22 - 25 , 1977, pp.428-433

Since 1967 there has again been great interest in chess programming. This paper demonstrates that the structure of today's most successful programs cannot be extended to play Master level chess. Certain basic requirements of a Master player's performance are shown to be outside the performance limits to which a program of this type could be extended. The paper also examines a basic weakness in the tree-searching model approach when applied to situations that cannot be searched to completion. This is the Horizon Effect, which causes unpredictable evaluation errors due to an interaction between the static evaluation function and the rules for search termination. The outline of a model of chess playing that avoids the Horizon Effect and appears extendable to play Master level chess is presented, together with some results already achieved In IJCAI-73: THIRD INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, 20-23 August 1973, Stanford University Stanford, California, pp. 77-85