BY,

ADARSH UDAYAN
Roll no. 1
Std: IX A

Social Science project 2010-1 1

BCEM School
July-2010

Miss. Kavitha K
Department of history, teacher
BCEM School

CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the project entitled in the

“Research In Chess” in the IXth standard, BCEM School,
is a record of project carried out by Adarsh Udayan under
my guidance and supervision.

Miss. Kavitha K
Department of history,
teacher
BCEM School

Gurupuram
July 2010
DECLARATION

I Adarsh Udayan (IX A) to here by declared that the

project entitled “Research InChess” is a work done by me
under the supervision of miss. Kavitha K, department of
history BCEM School Gurupuram.

Adarsh Udayan
IX A
BCEM School
Gurupuram

Gurupuram
July 2010

Acknowledgement

I express all glory and thanks to good the almighty

whose strengthened till now to complete my project.

I would like to express my thanks and sincere

gratitude to my esteemed teacher
Miss.Kavitha.k,department of history, BCEM School.

I express my sentimentence of gratitude to Miss.Mini

head of the department of history BCEM School.Without
whose valuable guidance and encourage it would not have
been possible for me to bring out the project.

I express my thanks to the liberarian miss.Usha, who

generously lend me suifficent books and periodicals which
helped me a lot in the preparation of this work.

I’ am also fortunate to have help and assistant from my

close relative and classmates and I thanked them all.

CONTENTS
Sl no. Topic pg no.
1 Introduction
2 Characteristics of the game
 a. Algebraic notation
b. Moves
i. King
ii. Rook
iii. Bishop
iv. Queen
v. Knight
vi. Capturing
vii. Pawns
viii. Castling
c. Relative piece values
d. Object of the game
e. Game notation
f. Conduct of the game
3 History
a. Origin of chess
b. Ancient precursors and related games
c. Introduction to Europe
d. Standardization of rules
e. Set design
f. The world championship and FIDE
g. Women in chess
4 Development of Theory
a. Philidor and the birth of chess theory
b. Morphy and the theory of attack
c. Steinitz and the theory of equilibrium
d. The Fischer clock
5 Chess and artificial intelligence
a. heuristics
b. Computer chess
c. Computer extension of chess theory
6 Chess composition
a. Studies about chess
7 ANNEXTURE
8 BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION
 This is a research about the chess. This research is
concentrated mainly with the origin of chess, old chess
players of the world, some moves of the chess, recent years
and this years chess players, studies about chess etc.
Chess is a game of skill for two players, each of whom
moves 16 figures according to fixed rules across a board
consisting of an eight-by-eight pattern of squares. . Victory
depends on concentration and intuitive vision. The chess
master Siegbert Tarrasch declared that “chess, like love, like
music, has the power to make men happy.” It is often called
the royal game.

Characteristics of the game

Chess is played on a board of 64 squares arranged in eight vertical rows

called files and eight horizontal rows called ranks. These squares
alternate between two colours: one light, such as white, beige, or
yellow; and the other dark, such as black or green. The board is set
between the two opponents so that each player has a light-coloured
square at the right-hand corner.

Algebraic notation

Individual moves and entire games can be recorded using one of several
forms of notation. By far the most widely used form, algebraic (or
coordinate) notation, identifies each square from the point of view of
the player with the light-coloured pieces, called White. The eight ranks
are numbered 1 through 8 beginning with the rank closest to White. The
files are labeled a through h beginning with the file at White’s left hand.
Each square has a name consisting of its letter and number, such as b3
or g8. Additionally, files a through d are referred to as the queenside,
and files e through h as the kingside..

Moves

The board represents a battlefield in which two armies fight to capture

each other’s king. A player’s army consists of 16 pieces .There are six
different types of pieces: king, rook, bishop, queen, knight, and pawn;
the pieces are distinguished by appearance and by how they move. The
players alternate moves, White going first.

King

White’s king begins the game on e1. Black’s king is opposite at e8. Each
king can move one square in any direction; e.g., White’s king can move
from e1 to d1, d2, e2, f2, or f1.

Rook

Each player has two rooks (formerly also known as castles), which begin
the game on the corner squares a1 and h1 for White, a8 and h8 for
Black. A rook can move vertically or horizontally to any unobstructed
square along the file or rank on which it is placed.
Bishop

Each player has two bishops, and they begin the game at c1 and f1 for
White, c8 and f8 for Black. A bishop can move to any unobstructed
square on the diagonal on which it is placed. Therefore, each player has
one bishop that travels only on light-coloured squares and one bishop
that travels only on dark-coloured squares.

Queen

Each player has one queen, which combines the powers of the rook and
bishop and is thus the most mobile and powerful piece. The White
queen begins at d1, the Black queen at d8.

Knight

Each player has two knights, and they begin the game on the squares
between their rooks and bishops—i.e., at b1 and g1 for White and b8
and g8 for Black. The knight has the trickiest move, an L-shape of two
steps: first one square like a rook, then one square like a bishop, but
always in a direction away from the starting square. A knight at e4 could
move to f2, g3, g5, f6, d6, c5, c3, or d2. The knight has the unique ability
to jump over any other piece to reach its destination. It always moves to
a square of a different colour.

Capturing

The king, rook, bishop, queen, and knight capture enemy pieces in the
same manner that they move. For example, a White queen on d3 can
capture a Black rook at h7 by moving to h7 and removing the enemy
piece from the board. Pieces can capture only enemy pieces.

Pawns

Each player has eight pawns, which begin the game on the second rank
closest to each player; i.e., White’s pawns start at a2, b2, c2, and so on,
while Black’s pawns start at a7, b7, c7, and so on. The pawns are unique
in several ways. A pawn can move only forward; it can never retreat. It
moves differently than it captures. A pawn moves to the square directly
ahead of it but captures on the squares diagonally in front of it; e.g., a
White pawn at f5 can move to f6 but can capture only on g6 or e6. An
unmoved pawn has the option of moving one or two squares forward.
This is the reason for another peculiar option, called en passant—that is,
in passing—available to a pawn when an enemy pawn on an adjoining
file advances two squares on its initial move and could have been
captured had it moved only one square. The first pawn can take the
advancing pawn en passant, as if it had advanced only one square. An en
passant capture must be made then or not at all. Only pawns can be
captured en passant. The last unique feature of the pawn occurs if it
reaches the end of a file; it must then be promoted to—that is,
exchanged for—a queen, rook, bishop, or knight.

Castling

The one exception to the rule that a player may move only one piece at
a time is a compound move of king and rook called castling. A player
castles by shifting the king two squares in the direction of a rook, which
is then placed on the square the king has crossed. For example, White
can castle kingside by moving the king from e1 to g1 and the rook from
h1 to f1. Castling is permitted only once in a game and is prohibited if
the king or rook has previously moved or if any of the squares between
them is occupied. Also, castling is not legal if the square the king starts
on, crosses, or finishes on is attacked by an enemy piece.

Relative piece values

Assigning the pawn a value of 1, the values of the other pieces are
approximately as follows: knight 3, bishop 3, rook 5, and queen 9. The
relative values of knights and bishops vary with different pawn
structures. Additionally, tactical considerations may temporarily
override the pieces’ usual relative values. Material concerns are
secondary to winning.

Object of the game

When a player moves a piece to a square on which it attacks the enemy

king—that is, a square from which it could capture the king if the king is
not shielded or moved. The game is won when one king is in check and
cannot avoid capture on the next move; this is called checkmate. A game
also can end when a player, believing the situation to be hopeless,
acknowledges defeat by resigning.

There are three possible results in chess: win, lose, or draw. There are
six ways a draw can come about: (1) by mutual consent, (2) when
neither player has enough pieces to deliver checkmate, (3) when one
player can check the enemy king endlessly (perpetual check), (4) when a
player who is not in check has no legal move (stalemate), (5) when an
identical position occurs three times with the same player having the
right to move, and (6) when no piece has been captured and no pawn
has been moved within a period of 50 moves.

In competitive events, a victory is scored as one point, a draw as half a

point, and a loss as no points.

Game notation

A move can be recorded by designating the initial of the piece moved

and the square to which it moves. For example, Be5 means a bishop has
moved to e5. There are two exceptions: a knight is identified by N, and
no initials are used for pawn moves. For example, 1 e4 means White’s
first move is a two-square advance of a pawn on the e-file, and 1 . . . Nf6
means Black’s response is to bring a knight from g8 to f6. For both White
and Black, castling kingside is indicated by 0-0, while castling queenside
is notated by 0-0-0. Captures are indicated by inserting an x or : between
the piece moving and the square it moves to. For pawn moves, this
means dxe5 indicates a White pawn on d4 captures a piece on e5. En
passant captures are designated by e.p. Checks are indicated by adding
ch or + at the end of the move, and checkmate is often indicated by
adding # or ++ at the end of the move. Notation is used to record games
as they are played and to analyze them in print afterward. In annotating
(commenting) on a game, an appended exclamation mark means a very
good move, two exclamation marks are occasionally used to indicate an
extremely good move, a question mark indicates a bad move, two
question marks indicate a blunder, and the combination of an
exclamation mark and a question mark on the same move indicates a
double-edged or somewhat dubious move.
Conduct of the game

Competitive chess is played according to a set of rules that supplement

the basic laws governing how the pieces move. Among the more
important rules are those governing completion of a move, recording of
games, time controls (see The time element and competition), and
penalties for illegal moves and other infractions.

Tournament and match chess is distinguished from casual games by the

strict provisions for completing a move. Unless preceded by the warning
“I adjust” (French: “j’adoube”), a piece touched must be moved or
captured (if legally possible), and a completed move may not be
retracted. The players also are obligated to record their moves. Only
after making a move can they stop their allotted time from elapsing,
usually by depressing a device on the chess clock used in competitive
play.

A player can be penalized in a variety of ways, including forfeiture of the

game, for consulting another player or any recorded material during the
game, for analyzing the game on another board, or for distracting the
opponent. Any player who realizes during a game that an illegal move
has been made may demand that the position before the infraction be
reinstated and that play proceed from there. If the illegality is
discovered after the game is completed, the result stands without
penalty.

Muslims brought chess to North Africa, Sicily, and Spain by the 10th
century. Eastern Slavs spread it to Kievan Rus about the same time. The
Vikings carried the game as far as Iceland and England and are believed
responsible for the most famous collection of chessmen, 78 walrus-ivory
pieces of various sets that were found on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer
Hebrides in 1831 and date from the 11th or 12th century..

History

Origin Of Chess

Internationally famous mind game and it is believed to have originated from

the Indian soil. There are many interesting legends pertaining to its origin.
One of the legend states that the wife of King Ravana (a character from the
Indian epic of Ramayana) invented the game 4000-5000 years ago. There is
also a reference in the Bhavishya Purana about the game.

Chess existed in India before it was known to have been played anywhere
else. The game might have originated from the ancient game of Chaturanga
in India. Chaturanga, a Sanskrit word, refers to the four branches of the army,
which are said in the Amarakosha (an ancient Indian Dictionary - S.B.) to be
elephants, horses, chariots and foot soldiers. Chaturanga was played on a
board of 64 squares consisting of four opposing players. It is the view of some
historians that this game was also used in the allocation of land among
different members of a clan when a new settlement was being established. H.
J. R. Murry, in his work titled A History of Chess, has concluded that chess is a
descendant of an Indian game played in the 7th century AD.

The current form of the game emerged in Europe during the second half
of the 15th century after evolving from an older game (Shatranj) of
Indian origin. Aspects of art are found in chess composition.
Theoreticians have developed extensive chess strategies and tactics
since the game's inception. One of the goals of early computer scientists
was to create a chess-playing machine. Chess is now deeply influenced
by the abilities of chess programs and the opportunity for online play. In
1997 Deep Blue became the first computer to beat a reigning World
Champion in a match when it defeated Garry Kasparov.

The tradition of organized competitive chess started in the 16th century.

The first official World Chess Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, claimed his
title in 1886; the current World Champion is Viswanathan Anand. Chess
is a recognized sport of the International Olympic Committee, and is led
by the FIDE. Today, chess is one of the world's most popular games,
played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by
correspondence, and in tournaments. Checkerboard game for two
players, each of whom moves 16 pieces according to fixed rules across
the board and tries to capture or immobilize (checkmate) the
opponent’s king.

The game may have originated in Asia about the 6th century, though it
continued to evolve as it spread into Europe in Byzantine times; its now-
standard rules first became generally accepted in Europe in the 16th
century. The players, designated white or black, start with their pieces
arranged on opposite ends of the board. Kings move one square in any
direction—but not into attack (check). Bishops move diagonally, and
rooks horizontally or vertically, any number of unobstructed squares.
Queens move like either bishops or rooks. Knights move to the nearest
nonadjacent square of the opposite colour (an “L” shape) and ignore
intervening chessmen. Pieces capture by moving to an enemy-occupied
square. Pawns move forward one square (except one or two on their
first move) and are promoted to any non-king piece if they eventually
reach the last row. Pawns capture only one diagonal square forward of
them. For one turn only, a pawn has the option, known as en passant, of
capturing an enemy pawn that has just made a first move of two squares
to avoid being captured by moving only one; the capture occurs as
though the pawn had moved only one square. When the first row
between a king and either rook is clear, and as long as the king and that
rook have not moved, a maneuver known as castling can be done in
which the king is shifted two squares toward that rook and the rook is
placed directly on the other side of the king. Kings cannot castle when in
check or through any square in which they would be in check. A draw,
known as a stalemate, occurs if a player is not in check but any move he
could make would place him in check. A draw also occurs if the same
position occurs three times (such as through “perpetual check”).

Chess first appeared in India about the 6th century ad and by the 10th
century had spread from Asia to the Middle East and Europe. Since at
least the 15th century, chess has been known as the “royal game”
because of its popularity among the nobility. Rules and set design slowly
evolved until both reached today’s standard in the early 19th century.
Once an intellectual diversion favoured by the upper classes, chess went
through an explosive growth in interest during the 20th century as
professional and state-sponsored players competed for an officially
recognized world championship title and increasingly lucrative
tournament prizes. Organized chess tournaments, postal
correspondence games, and Internet chess now attract men, women,
and children around the world.
Ancient precursors and related games

The origin of chess remains a matter of controversy. There is no credible

evidence that chess existed in a form approaching the modern game
before the 6th century ce. Game pieces found in Russia, China, India,
Central Asia, Pakistan, and elsewhere that have been determined to be
older than that are now regarded as coming from earlier distantly
related board games, often involving dice and sometimes using playing
boards of 100 or more squares.

One of those earlier games developed into a four-player war game

called chaturanga, a Sanskrit name for a battle formation mentioned in
the Indian epic Mahabharata. Chaturanga was flourishing in
northwestern India by the 7th century and is regarded as the earliest
precursor of modern chess because it had two key features found in all
later chess variants—different pieces had different powers (unlike
checkers and go), and victory was based on one piece, the king of
modern chess.

How chaturanga evolved is unclear. Some historians say chaturanga,

perhaps played with dice on a 64-square board, gradually transformed
into shatranj (or chatrang).The two-player game popular in northern
India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and southern parts of Central Asia after 600
ce. Shatranj resembled chaturanga but added a new piece, a firzān
(counselor), which had nothing to do with any troop formation. A game
of shatranj could be won either by eliminating all an opponent’s pieces
(baring the king) or by ensuring the capture of the king. The initial
positions of the pawns and knights have not changed, but there were
considerable regional and temporal variations for the other pieces.

The game spread to the east, north, and west, taking on sharply
different characteristics. In the East, carried by Buddhist pilgrims, Silk
Road traders, and others, it was transformed into a game with inscribed
disks that were often placed on the intersection of the lines of the board
rather than within the squares. About 750 ce chess reached China, and
by the 11th century it had come to Japan and Korea. Chinese chess, the
most popular version of the Eastern game, has 9 files and 10 ranks as
well as a boundary—the river, between the 5th and 6th ranks—that
limits access to the enemy camp and makes the game slower than its
Western cousin.
Introduction to Europe

A form of chaturanga or shatranj made its way to Europe by way of

Persia, the Byzantine Empire, and, perhaps most important of all, the
expanding Arabian empire. The oldest recorded game, found in a 10th-
century manuscript, was played between a Baghdad historian, believed
to be a favourite of three successive caliphs, and a pupil.

Muslims brought chess to North Africa, Sicily, and Spain by the 10th
century. Eastern Slavs spread it to Kievan Rus about the same time. The
Vikings carried the game as far as Iceland and England and are believed
responsible for the most famous collection of chessmen, 78 walrus-ivory
pieces of various sets that were found on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer
Hebrides in 1831 and date from the 11th or 12th century..

Chess and dice games were periodically banned by kings and religious
leaders. For example, King Louis IX forbade the game in France in 1254.
However, the game’s popularity was helped by its social cachet: a chess
set was often associated with wealth, knowledge, and power. It was a
favourite of Kings Henry I, Henry II, John, and Richard I of England, of
Philip II and Alfonso X (the Wise) of Spain, and of Ivan IV (the Terrible) of
Russia. It was known as the royal game as early as the 15th century.

World chess champions

Championship
Name Nationality
region
1866–94 Steinitz, Wilhelm Austrian
1894–1921 Lasker, Emanuel German
1921–27 Capablanca, José Raúl Cuban
1927–35 Alekhine, Alexander Russian-French
1935–37 Euwe, Max Dutch
1937–46 Alekhine, Alexander Russian-French
Botvinnik, Mikhail
1948–57 Russian
Moiseyevich
1957–58 Smyslov, Vasily Russian
Botvinnik, Mikhail
1958–60 Russian
Moiseyevich
1960–61 Tal, Mikhail Nekhemyevich Latvian
1961–63 Botvinnik, Mikhail Russian
 Moiseyevich
Petrosyan, Tigran
1963–69 Georgian
Vartanovich
1969–72 Spassky, Boris Vasilyevich Russian
1972–75 Fischer, Robert (Bobby) American
Karpov, Anatoly
1975–85 Russian
Yevgenyevich
1985–2000 Kasparov, Garry Russian
2000–07 Kramnik, Vladimir Russian
2007– Anand, Vishwanathan Indian
Other notable chess personalities:
Anderssen, Adolf
Loyd, Sam
Morphy, Paul
Nimzowitsch, Aron
Philidor, François-André
Réti, Richard
Staunton, Howard
Standardization of rules

The modern rules and appearance of pieces evolved slowly, with

widespread regional variation. By 1300, for example, the pawn had
acquired the ability to move two squares on its first turn, rather than
only one at a time as it did in shatranj. But this rule did not win general
acceptance throughout Europe for more than 300 years.

Chess made its greatest progress after two crucial rule changes that
became popular after 1475. Until then the counselor was limited to
moving one square diagonally at a time. And, because a pawn that
reached the eighth rank could become only a counselor, pawn
promotion was a relatively minor factor in the course of a game. But
under the new rules the counselor underwent a sex change and gained
vastly increased mobility to become the most powerful piece on the
board—the modern queen. This and the increased value of pawn
promotion added a dynamic new element to chess. Also, the chaturanga
piece called the elephant, which had been limited to a two-square
diagonal jump in shatranj, became the bishop, more than doubling its
range.

Until these changes occurred, checkmate was relatively rare, and more
often a game was decided by baring the king. With the new queen and
bishop powers, the trench warfare of medieval chess was replaced by a
game in which checkmate could be delivered in as few as two moves.

The last two major changes in the rules—castling and the en passant
capture—took longer to win acceptance. Both rules were known in the
15th century but had limited usage until the 18th century. Minor
variations in other rules continued until the late 19th century; for
example, it was not acceptable in many parts of Europe as late as the
mid-19th century to promote a pawn to a queen if a player still had the
original queen.

Set design

The appearance of the pieces has alternated between simple and ornate
since chaturanga times. The simple design of pieces before 600 ce
gradually led to figurative sets depicting animals, warriors, and
noblemen. But Muslim sets of the 9th–12th centuries were often
nonrepresentational and made of simple clay or carved stone following
the Islamic prohibition of images of living creatures. The return to
simpler, symbolic shatranj pieces is believed to have spurred the game’s
popularity by making sets easier<script
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by redirecting the players’ attention from the intricate pieces to the
game itself.

Stylized sets, often adorned with precious and semi-precious stones,

returned to fashion as the game spread to Europe and Russia. Playing
boards, which had monochromatic squares in the Muslim world, began
to have alternating black and white, or red and white, squares by 1000
ce and were often made of fine wood or marble. Peter I (the Great) of
Russia had special campaign boards made of soft leather that he carried
during military efforts.
The king became the largest piece and acquired a crown and sometimes
an elaborate throne and mace. The knight’s close identification with the
horse dates back to chaturanga. The pawn, as the lowest in power and
social standing, has traditionally been the smallest and least
representational of the pieces. The queen grew in size after 1475, when
its powers expanded, and changed from a male counselor to the king’s
female consort. The bishop was known by different names—“fool” in
French and “elephant” in Russian, for example—and was not universally
recognized by a distinctive mitre until the 19th century. Depiction of the
rook also varied considerably. In Russia it was usually represented as a
sailing ship until the 20th century. Elsewhere it was a warrior in a chariot
or a castle turret.

The standard for modern sets was established about 1835 with a simple
design by an Englishman, Nathaniel Cook. After it was patented in 1849,
the design was endorsed by Howard Staunton, then the world’s best
player; because of Staunton’s extensive promotion, it subsequently
became known as the Staunton pattern. Only sets based on the
Staunton design are allowed in international competition today.

The world championship and FIDE

The popularity of chess has for the past two centuries been closely
tied to competition, usually in the form of two-player matches, for the
title of world champion. The title was an unofficial one until 1886, but
widespread spectator interest in the game began more than 50 years
earlier. The first major international event was a series of six matches
held in 1834 between the leading French and British players, Louis-
Charles de la Bourdonnais of Paris and Alexander McDonnell of
London, which ended with Bourdonnais’s victory. For the first time, a
major chess event was reported extensively in newspapers and
analyzed in books. Following Bourdonnais’s death in 1840, he was
succeeded by Staunton after another match that gained international
attention, Staunton’s defeat of Pierre-Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant
of France in 1843. This match also helped introduce the idea of stakes
competition, since Staunton won the £100 put up by supporters of the
two players.
Staunton used his position as unofficial world champion to popularize
the Staunton-pattern set, to promote a uniform set of rules, and to
organize the first international tournament, held in London in 1851.
Karl Ernst Adolf Anderssen, a German schoolteacher, was inspired by
the Bourdonnais-McDonnell match to turn from problem composing
to tournament competition, and he won the London tournament and
with it recognition as unofficial champion. (See Game 4.) The London
tournament, in turn, inspired American players to organize the first
national championship, the First American Chess Congress, in New
York City in 1857, which set off the first chess craze in the Western
Hemisphere. The winner, Paul Morphy of New Orleans, was
recognized as unofficial world champion after defeating Anderssen in
1858.

The world championship became more formalized after Morphy

retired and Anderssen was defeated by Wilhelm Steinitz of Prague in a
match in 1866. Steinitz was the first to claim the authority to
determine how a title match should be held. (See Game 6.) He set
down a series of rules and financial conditions under which he would
defend his status as the world’s foremost player, and in 1886 he
agreed to play Johann Zukertort of Austria in the first match
specifically designated as being for the world championship. Steinitz
reserved the right to determine whose challenge he would accept and
when and how often he would defend his title.

Steinitz’s successor, Emanuel Lasker of Germany (see Games 7, 8, 9,

and 10), proved a more demanding champion than Steinitz in
arranging matches. He took long periods, from 1897 to 1907 and later
from 1910 to 1921, without defending his title. After the leading
national chess federations, the British and German, failed to arrange a
match between Lasker and any of his leading challengers on the eve of
World War I, the momentum for an independent international
authority began to grow.

The controversy over the championship was eased when José Raúl
Capablanca of Cuba defeated Lasker in 1921 and won the agreement,
at a tournament in London in 1922, of the world’s other leading
players to a written set of rules for championship challenges. Under
those rules, any player who met certain<script
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conditions (in particular, guaranteeing a $10,000 stake) could
challenge the World Champion. While the top players were trying to
adhere to the London Rules, representatives of 15 countries met in
Paris in 1924 to organize the first permanent international chess
federation, known as FIDE, its French acronym for Fédération
Internationale des Échecs.

The London Rules worked smoothly in 1927 when Capablanca was

dethroned by Alexander Alekhine (see Game 14), the first Russian-
born champion, but then proved to be a financial obstacle in
Capablanca’s bid for a rematch. FIDE’s attempts to intervene failed.
Alekhine was widely criticized for manipulating the rules, and when he
died in 1946 FIDE assumed the authority to organize world
championship matches.

From 1948, when FIDE organized a match tournament to fill the

vacancy created by Alekhine’s death, until 1975 the FIDE format
worked without major problems. The international federation
organized three-year cycles of regional and international competitions
to determine the challengers for the World Champion and solicited
bids for match sites. The champion no longer had a veto power over
opponents and was required to defend the title every three years.

FIDE also took over the Women’s World Championship and biennial
Olympiad team championships, which originated in the 1920s. In
addition, the federation developed new championship titles,
particularly for junior players in various age groups. It also created a
system for recognizing top players by arithmetic rating and by titles
based on tournament performance. The highest title, after World
Champion, is International Grandmaster, of whom there are now
more than 500 in the world.

The easing and eventual end of the Cold War spurred international
chess by reducing barriers. By the mid-1990s, close to 2,000
tournaments registered with FIDE were held each year—more than 50
times the number during the 1950s. Amateur chess expanded sharply.
Membership in the U.S. Chess Federation jumped from 2,100 in 1957
to more than 70,000 in 1973.

All World Champions and challengers from 1951 to 1969 were Soviet
citizens, and all the championship matches were held in Moscow with
small prizes and limited international publicity. The victory of Robert J.
(Bobby) Fischer of the United States in 1972 was an abrupt change.
(See Game 20.) Fischer’s demands spurred an increase in the prize
fund to $250,000—a sum greater than all previous title matches
combined. After winning the highly publicized match, Fischer insisted
on a greater say in match rules than had any previous champion in the
FIDE era. In particular, he objected to a rule, used by FIDE since 1951,
that limited championship matches to 24 games. FIDE dropped the
rule, but Fischer demanded further concessions. In the end he refused
to defend his title; in 1975 he became the first champion to lose it by
default.

Fischer’s successor, Anatoly Karpov of the Soviet Union, reigned for 10

years but was dethroned in 1985 by a countryman and bitter rival,
Garry Kasparov. (See Game 22.) Kasparov then clashed repeatedly
with FIDE over the rules governing the championship. He reluctantly
agreed to defend his title under the federation’s rules three times
during 1986–90, winning each time. However, when Nigel Short of
England won the right to challenge Kasparov for the championship in
1993, he and Kasparov decided instead to play the match under the
auspices of a new organization, the Professional Chess Association
(PCA). (See Game 23.) Before Kasparov defeated Short in London in
late 1993 in the first PCA championship, FIDE disqualified Kasparov
and organized its own world championship match, won by Karpov.

FIDE began holding annual “knockout” tournaments in 1999 to

determine its championship. Alexander Khalifman of Russia won the
first tournament, which was held in Las Vegas, Nevada. In 2000 the
tournament venue was split between New Delhi, India, and Tehrān,
Iran, and was won by Viswanathan Anand of India. Meanwhile,
Kasparov lost a title match to Vladimir Kramnik of Russia in 2000.

Following negotiations with FIDE, which recognized Kramnik as the

“classical” world chess champion, he agreed to a unification match in
2006 with FIDE’s challenger, the Bulgarian grandmaster Veselin
 Topalov, who had won the 2005 FIDE World Championship
Tournament. Kramnik won the match. As part of the unification
contract, the winner agreed to risk the consolidated title in FIDE’s
2007 World Championship Tournament. Anand won the tournament
and successfully defended the title against Kramnik in a 12-game
match in 2008

Women in chess

Separation of the sexes in chess is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Literature abounds with examples of men and women playing one
another before 1800. (For example, Shakespeare’s only chess scene
depicts Miranda playing Ferdinand in the last act of The Tempest.) But
women were often barred from the coffeehouses and taverns where
chess clubs developed in the 19th century. Women players achieved
distinction separately from men by the middle of the century. The first
chess clubs specifically for women were organized in The<script
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The first chess book written by a woman, The ABC of Chess, by “A Lady”
(H.I. Cooke), appeared in England in 1860 and went into 10 editions. The
first women’s tournament was sponsored in 1884 by the Sussex Chess
Association.

Women also gained distinction in postal and problem chess during this
period. An American woman, Ellen Gilbert, defeated a strong English
amateur, George Gossip, twice in an international correspondence
match in 1879—announcing checkmate in 21 moves in one game and in
35 moves in the other. Edith Winter-Wood composed more than 2,000
problems, 700 of which appeared in a book published in 1902.

The first woman player to gain attention in over-the-board competition

with men was Vera Menchik (1906–44) of Great Britain. She won the
first Women’s World Championship, a tournament organized by FIDE in
1927, and the next six women’s championship tournaments, in 1930–39.
Her good results against men in British events led to invitations to some
of the strongest pre-World War II tournaments, including Carlsbad 1929
(tournaments are identified by venue and year) and Moscow 1935.
Among the strong male masters who lost to her were the world
champion Max Euwe, Samuel Reshevsky, Sultan Khan, Jacques Mieses,
Edgar Colle, and Frederick Yates. She was also one of the first women
chess professionals. (See Game 15.)

Women’s chess received a major boost when the Soviet Union endorsed
separate women’s tournaments as part of a general encouragement of
the game. The 1924 women’s championship of Leningrad was the first
women’s tournament sponsored by any government. Massive events,
larger than anything open to either sex in the West, followed; nearly
5,000 women took part in the preliminary sections of the 1936 Soviet
women’s championship, for example.

Improvements in playing strength ensued and led to Soviet domination

of women’s chess for more than 30 years. After Menchik’s death, FIDE
held a 16-player tournament in Moscow during the winter of 1949–50 to
fill the vacancy. Soviet women took the top four places.

The Women’s World Championship has been decided by matches or

elimination match tournaments organized by FIDE since 1953. After
Menchik’s death the next three champions were Ludmilla Rudenko of
Ukraine and Elizaveta Bykova and Olga Rubtsova of Russia. But, with the
victory of Nona Gaprindashvili in 1962, an era of supremacy by Georgian
players began. Gaprindashvili held the title for 16 years and became the
first woman to earn the title of International Grandmaster. (FIDE
established separate titles of International Woman Master in 1950 and
International Woman Grandmaster in 1977.) Gaprindashvili was
succeeded by another Georgian, Maya Chiburdanidze, in 1978.
Georgians also won the right to challenge the champions in 1975, 1981,
and 1988.

Soviet domination of women’s chess ended with the defeat of

Chiburdanidze by Xie Jun, of China, in 1991 and the rise of the three
Polgár sisters, Susan, Zsófia, and Judit. The Polgárs of Budapest were the
most impressive women prodigies ever; each had achieved
grandmaster-level performances by age 15. They also distinguished
themselves by generally avoiding women-only competitions, until Susan
Polgar defeated Xie for the women’s championship in 1996.

In the 1990s a series of men-versus-women events were organized as

the difference in playing strength narrowed. In 1995 a team of five
senior male grandmasters, including the former world champions Boris
Spassky and Vasily Smyslov, was beaten 26 1/2 to 23 1/2 in a match
against five leading women. Among the women was Judit Polgár, ranked
eighth in the world on the international rating lists issued in July and
October 2005 by FIDE, the highest level any woman had ever achieved.

Zhu Chen of China won the 2001 FIDE Women’s World Championship
Tournament. FIDE had difficulty funding further events in the series, so
the next tournament did not take place until 2004. The 2004
tournament was won by Antoaneta Stefanova of Bulgaria. Back on a
regular two-year cycle, the women’s championship was won in 2006 by
Xu Yuhua of China and in 2008 by Alexandra Kosteniuk of Russia.

Women’s world chess champions

Championship reign name Nationality
1927-44 Menchik-Stevenson, Vera Francevna* Russian
1950-53 Rudenko, Ludmilla Ukrainian
1953-56 Bykova, Elizaveta Russian
1956-58 Rubtsova, Olga Russian
1958-62 Bykova, Elizaveta Russian
1962-78 Gaprindashvili, Nona Georgian
1978-91 Chiburdanidze, Maya Georgian
1991-96 Xie Jun Chinese
1996-99 Polgar, Susan** Hungarian
1999-2001 Xie Jun Chinese
2001-2004 Zhu Chen Chinese
2004-2006 Antoaneta Stefanova Bulgarian
 2006-2008 Xu Yuhua Chinese

2008- Alexandra Kosteniuk Russian

Development of Theory

There are three recognized phases in a chess game: the opening, where
piece development and control of the centre predominate; the
middlegame, where maneuvering in defense and attack against the
opponent’s king or weaknesses occurs; and the endgame, where,
generally after several piece exchanges, pawn promotion becomes the
dominant theme. Chess theory consists of opening knowledge, tactics
(or combinations), positional analysis (particularly pawn structures),
strategy.

Philidor and the birth of chess theory

Early chess players recognized that a typical game could be divided into
three parts, each with its own character and priorities: the opening
stage, when a player develops the pieces from their starting squares; a
middlegame stage, in which plans are conceived and carried out; and an
endgame stage, following several exchanges and captures, in which the
player with<script
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tries to convert an advantage into victory.

Books analyzing a few basic opening moves, elementary middlegame

combinations, and simple elements of endgame technique appeared as
early as the 15th century. About 1620 an Italian master, Gioacchino
Greco, wrote an analysis of a series of composed games that illustrated
two contrasting approaches to chess. Those games pit a material-
minded player, who attempts to win as many of the opponent’s pieces
as possible, against an opponent who sacrifices material in pursuit of
checkmate—and usually wins. Greco, regarded as the first chess
professional, emphasized tactics. His games were filled with pretty
combinations made possible by poor defensive play. They had
considerable influence in popularizing chess and in showing that there
were different theories about how it should be played.

The first coordinated explanation of how chess games are won came in
the 18th century from François-André Philidor of France. Philidor, a
composer of music, was regarded as the world’s best chess player for
nearly 50 years. In 1749 Philidor wrote and published L’Analyze des
échecs (Chess Analyzed), an enormously influential book that appeared
in more than 100 editions.
In Analyze Philidor used apparently fictitious games to illustrate his
principles for conducting a strategic, rather than tactical, battle. His
comments on certain 1 e4 e5 openings were copied for decades by
other masters, and his analysis of king, rook, and bishop against king and
rook was the first extensive examination of a particular endgame. But it
was Philidor’s middlegame advice that was his greatest legacy. He
emphasized the role of planning: Once all a player’s pieces are
developed, that player should try to form an overall goal, such as
kingside attack, that coordinates the forces. Philidor also placed a
premium on anticipating enemy threats rather than merely
concentrating on one’s own attack.

Greco and previous writers had explored the tactical interplay of two or
three pieces. But Philidor believed that the significance of the pawns had
been overlooked and drew particular attention to their weaknesses and
strengths. His most famous comment—that “pawns are the very life of
the game”—is often cited without his explanation of why they are
important: because, he said, pawns alone form the basis for attack.

Philidor believed that a mobile mass of pawns is the most important

positional factor in the middlegame and that an attack will fail unless the
pawns to sustain it are properly supported.He warned against allowing
pawns to be isolated from one another, doubled on the same file, or
made backward—that is, unguarded by another pawn and incapable of
being safely advanced. He linked the qualities of pawns to other pieces
and was the first to emphasize how a bishop could be bad or good
depending on how restricted it was by a fixed pawn structure. He also
advocated the exchange of an f-pawn for an enemy e-pawn because it
would partially open the file for a castled rook at f1. While previous
authors had shown how pawns or other pieces could be temporarily
sacrificed in checkmating or material-gaining combinations, Philidor
illustrated the purely positional sacrifice in which a player obtains
compensation such as superior piece mobility or pawn structure.

Morphy and the theory of attack

From 1750 to 1769 a group of masters from Modena, Italy—Ercole del

Rio, Giambattista Lolli, and Domenico Ponziani—criticized Philidor’s
ideas. They believed that he had exaggerated the importance of the
pawns at the expense of the other pieces and had minimized the power
of a direct attack on the enemy king. By analyzing the play of 16th-
century Italian masters, the Modena school showed that games could be
won in fewer than 20 moves through speedy piece mobilization,
compared with Philidor’s slow-developing pawn marches.

There followed a proliferation of speculative pawn sacrifices in the

opening, called gambits, in order to achieve rapid mobilization and open
lines for an attack. Checkmating attacks, often with startling sacrifices in
concluding combinations, became the hallmark of many players of the
19th century. These leading masters were described as members of the
Romantic school of chess. See for one of the most celebrated examples
of Romanticism.

The ideas of the Modena school were not fully appreciated until they
appeared, in slightly different form, in the games of Paul Morphy, the
first American recognized as the world’s best player. Morphy’s chess
career lasted less than three years and consisted of fewer than 75
serious games. In 1858–59 he defeated all the leading European players,
with the disappointing exception of Howard Staunton, who evaded all
attempts to arrange a match. At the age of 22 Morphy retired from
serious chess. Morphy remains the only great chess thinker who left no
written legacy.

Morphy’s contemporaries knew as much about the openings as he did,

and some of them could calculate combinations as well as he. But
Morphy understood how and when to attack<script
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else. This enabled him not only to win favourable positions but also to
avoid loss in inferior positions. After he defeated Adolf Anderssen, the
greatest of the Romantics, by a lopsided score of 7–2, a supporter asked
Anderssen why he had not sacrificed his pieces brilliantly against the
American, as he had against other masters. “Morphy won’t let me,”
Anderssen is reputed to have replied.

Morphy appreciated that superior development—getting pieces onto

good squares in the first 10 to 15 moves—was relatively unimportant in
the semiclosed, blocked pawn structures that Philidor had embraced.
But, as the centre or kingside became more open, an advantage in
development increased in value. In Morphy’s best-known games, pawns
and knights played minor roles. Pawns were often sacrificed so that the
queen, rooks, and bishops could join the attack as soon as possible. The
first priority for Morphy was the initiative, the ability to force matters.
Superior development in a position with few centre pawns conferred the
initiative on one player. In the games of lesser players the initiative
might pass back and forth as players err. But Morphy rarely failed to
bring an initiative to fruition.

Steinitz and the theory of equilibrium

Morphy’s eventual successor, Wilhelm Steinitz, reigned as world

champion until 1894, when he was 58. The Prague-born Steinitz
managed to retain his superiority for so long because he developed new
principles of the middlegame, particularly in closed or semiclosed
positions, that only his successor, Emanuel Lasker, and Lasker’s
contemporaries fully appreciated. Steinitz said his “modern school” was
guided by two premises: first, that the natural outcome of a game is a
draw because of the inherent balance between the forces of White and
Black and, second, that checkmate is the ultimate but not the first
objective of the game.

Steinitz began his career as a tactical, combinational player in the

Morphy style. But in his late thirties he developed insight into subtle
positional characteristics that take precedence in positions in which the
centre is fully or partially blocked by immobile pawns. Steinitz tried to
answer the mystery of why some attacks succeed, regardless of how
skillful the defender, while others fail, regardless of how talented the
attacker. A failed attack, he added, often results in defeat for the
attacker, whose forces suddenly become poorly coordinated in the face
of a counterattack.

Steinitz concluded that in a typical position each side has certain small
advantages which tend to balance one another. For example, a player
may have weakened the opponent’s pawns but at the expense of
trading a bishop for a slightly less valuable knight. An attack is justified
only when the balance has been upset, either by the player’s mistakes or
the opponent’s good moves. Morphy’s advantage in development was
one way of upsetting the balance. But by the 1870s, after Morphy’s
games became familiar to all masters, it became harder and harder to
obtain a lead in development against an unwilling opponent.

Steinitz realized that the way to justify a decisive attack in the post-
Morphy era was to accumulate small, often subtle, advantages—for
example, having two bishops when one’s opponent has two knights,
having an entrenched knight at a fortified outpost, or having greater
maneuvering space. In his games Steinitz showed how slow-evolving
maneuvers in the opening, particularly with knights, paid dividends in
the middlegame if the centre was closed. He originated the term “hole”
to mean a vulnerable square that has lost its pawn protection and can
be occupied favourably by an enemy piece.

While a lead in development may be transient, other advantages, such

as a superior pawn structure, could be nurtured into the endgame,
Steinitz said. Structural weaknesses generally involve pawns that are
difficult to defend or squares (especially in the centre or around the
king) that enemy pieces can occupy without being dislodged by pawn
attacks. The following common pawn weaknesses are disadvantageous
in direct proportion to their exploitability, which tends to increase as
pieces are exchanged. A pawn with no friendly pawns on adjoining files
is called an isolated pawn; isolated pawns may confer middlegame
compensation through control of important squares (if located in the
centre) or by giving rooks adjoining open files along which to attack. A
pawn on an open file whose advance is restrained by an enemy pawn on
an adjoining file and that is unguardable by any other pawn is termed a
backward pawn. Two pawns that occupy the same file (through
captures) are called doubled pawns.

The small advantages could be converted at an appropriate moment to

material by means of attack. He added that a player who does not attack
when in a position advantageous enough to justify it will lose the
advantage. Unlike the Romantics, who relentlessly aimed for the enemy
king, Steinitz argued that the nature of the position dictated<script
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the kingside or queenside. The win of a mere pawn was in the large
majority of cases fatal among first-class masters.
Some subtle advantages do not become significant until the endgame,
Steinitz found. For example, after routine pawn captures and recaptures,
a player is often left with three pawns each on the kingside and
queenside, while the opponent has four on the kingside and two on the
queenside. The kingside pawns are often held back near or on their
original squares for king protection. But, advancing on the queenside
where the player has a majority of the pawns, referred to as a queenside
majority, can create a powerful passed pawn that may prove decisive in
the late middlegame or endgame. On the other hand, one of Steinitz’
students, Harry Nelson Pillsbury, popularized the “minority attack,” in
which the player with fewer queenside pawns advances them in certain
positions in order to weaken his opponent’s pawns.

Steinitz was also the first master of defensive play. Even when playing
the White pieces, he often invited his opponent to open the centre by
exchanging pawns or to be the first to cross the fourth rank. He
reasoned that such attacks must be premature if the equilibrium was in
balance and so could be punished after patient defensive play.

While Philidor was known for his writings and Morphy for his games,
Steinitz left a legacy of both. In match play he consistently defeated the
leading Romantics—Adolf Anderssen, Joseph Blackburne, Johann
Zukertort, and Mikhail Chigorin. He is regarded as the first player to take
a scientific approach to chess.

Time elements & controls

The Fischer clock

Quick chess took a new turn in the 1990s with a variation on Staunton’s
single-move principle and Lasa’s time-budget idea. Fischer, who had not
played a public game since winning the world championship in 1972,
patented a chess clock in 1988 that added an increment of time after a
player completed a move and hit the button on top. For example, in a
speed game, a player could begin with five minutes and receive an
additional 10 or 15 seconds<script
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move.
The Fischer clock gained international attention after the expatriate
American briefly came out of retirement in 1992 to play a nonsanctioned
world championship match with Boris Spassky in the cities of Belgrade
and Sveti Stefan in Yugoslavia. The rules of the match stipulated that
each player begin with 111 minutes on his clock and receive one minute
for each move played. This meant that after 40 moves each player had
been allotted 151 minutes, or one minute more than the 40-in-2 1/2-
hours format used when Fischer won the championship title from
Spassky in 1972. For the second control, the match rules gave each
player an additional 40 minutes to play 20 moves but also added an
extra minute for each move played.

As chess promoters moved toward organizing tournaments with

spectators—in particular, television audiences—in mind, the shorter
time limits became a way of life for professional players. One of the
most interesting annual tournaments, the Melody Amber held in
Monaco since 1992, features top grandmasters playing a pair of games
using the Fischer clock. In one of the games the players begin with four
minutes and receive 10 seconds for each move played. In the second
they play without sight of the board—so-called blindfold chess—
beginning with four minutes and receiving 20 seconds for each move.

Chess and artificial intelligence

Machines capable of playing chess have fascinated people since the

latter half of the 18th century, when the Turk, the first of the pseudo-
automatons, began a triumphal exhibition tour of Europe. Like its 19th-
century successor Ajeeb, the Turk was a cleverly constructed cabinet
that concealed a human master. The mystery of the Turk was the subject
of more than a dozen books and a widely discussed article written by
Edgar Allan Poe in 1836. Several world-class players were employed to
operate the pseudo-automatons, including Harry Nelson Pillsbury, who
was Ajeeb during part of the 1890s, and Isidor Gunsberg and Jean
Taubenhaus, who operated, by remote control, Mephisto, the last of the
pseudo-automatons, before it was dismantled following World War I. Se
Heuristics

The ability of a machine to play chess well has taken on symbolic

meaning since the first precomputer devices more than a century ago. In
1890 a Spanish scientist, Leonardo Torres y Quevado, introduced an
electromagnetic device—composed of wire, switch, and circuit—that
was capable of checkmating a human opponent in a simple endgame,
king and rook versus king. The machine did not always play the best
moves and sometimes took 50 moves to perform a task that an average
human player could complete in fewer than 20. But it could recognize
illegal moves and always delivered eventual checkmate. Torres y
Quevado acknowledged that the apparatus had no practical purpose. As
a scientific toy, however, it gained attention for his belief in the
capability of machines to be programmed to follow certain rules.

No significant progress in this area was made until the development of

the electronic digital machine after World War II. About 1947 Alan
Turing of the University of Manchester, Eng., developed the first simple
program capable of<script
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(one side’s move) ahead. Four years later a Manchester colleague, D.G.
Prinz, wrote a program capable of solving mate-in-two-move problems
but not actually playing chess.

A breakthrough came in 1948, when the research scientist Claude

Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., U.S.,
presented a paper that influenced all future programmers. Shannon, like
Torres y Quevada and Turing, stressed that progress in developing a
chess-playing program would have a wider application and could lead,
he said, to machines that could translate from language to language or
make strategic military decisions.

Shannon appreciated that a computer conducting an entire game would

have to make decisions using incomplete information because it could
not examine all the positions leading to checkmate, which might lie 40
or 50 moves ahead. Therefore, it would have to select moves that were
good, not merely legal, by evaluating future positions that were not
checkmates. Shannon’s paper set down criteria for evaluating each
position a program would consider.

This evaluation function is crucial because even a rudimentary program

would have to determine the relative differences between thousands of
different positions. In a typical position White may have 30 legal moves,
and to each of those moves Black may have 30 possible replies. This
means that a machine considering White’s best move may have to
examine 30 × 30, or 900, positions resulting from Black’s reply, a two-ply
search. A three-ply search—an initial move by White, a Black reply, and
a White response to that—would mean 30 × 30 × 30, or 27,000, different
final positions to be considered. (It has been estimated that humans
examine only about 50 positions before choosing a move.)

Turing’s evaluation function was dominated by determining which side

had more pieces in various future positions. But Shannon suggested that
each position could be weighed using positional criteria, including the
condition of pawns and their control of the centre squares, the mobility
of the other pieces, and specific cases of well-placed pieces, such as a
rook on an open (pawnless) file or on the seventh rank. Other criteria
were used by later programmers to refine and improve the evaluation
function. All criteria had to be quantified. For example, a human master
can quickly evaluate the mobility of bishops or the relative safety of the
king. Early programs performed the same evaluation by counting the
number of legal bishop moves or the squares under control around a
player’s king.

Computer chess

Computers began to compete against humans in the late 1960s. In

February 1967 MacHack VI, a program written by Richard Greenblatt, an
MIT undergraduate, drew one game and lost four in a U.S. Chess
Federation tournament. Its results improved markedly, from a
performance equivalent to a USCF rating of 1243 to reach 1640 by April
1967, about the average for a USCF member. The first American
computer championship was held in New York City in 1970 and was won
by Chess 3.0, a program devised by a team of Northwestern University
researchers that dominated computer chess in the 1970s.
Technical advances accelerated progress in computer chess during the
1970s and ’80s. Sharp increases in computing power enabled computers
to “see” much further. Computers of the 1960s could evaluate positions
no more than two moves ahead, but authorities estimated that each
additional half-move of search would increase a program’s performance
level by 250 rating points. This was borne out by a steady improvement
by the best programs until Deep Thought played above the 2700 level in
1988. When Deep Blue, its successor, was introduced in 1996, it saw as
far as six moves ahead. (Gary Kasparov said he normally looks only three
to five moves ahead, adding that for humans more are not needed.)

Also helping computer progress was the availability of microprocessors

in the late 1970s. This allowed programmers unattached to universities
to develop commercial microcomputers that by the 1990s were nearly
as strong as programs running on mainframes. By the late 1980s the
strongest machines were capable of beating more than 90 percent of
the world’s serious players. In 1988 a computer, HiTech, developed at
Carnegie Mellon University, defeated a grandmaster, Arnold Denker, in a
short match. In the same year another Carnegie Mellon program, Deep
Thought, defeated a top-notch grandmaster, Bent Larsen, in a
tournament game.

HiTech used 64 computer chips, one for each square on the board, and
was capable of considering up to 175,000 positions per second. Feng-
Hsiung Hsu, a Carnegie Mellon student, improved on HiTech with a
custom-designed chip. The result, Chiptest, won the North American
Computer Championship in 1987 and evolved into Deep Thought, a
program powerful enough to consider 700,000 positions a second.
Although its evaluation skills were not as well developed as HiTech’s—
and far below that of a human grandmaster—Deep Thought was
sponsored by International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)
in<script
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the world’s best player by the mid-1990s in a traditional time limit.

At faster speeds even personal computers were able to defeat the

world’s best humans by 1994. In that year a Fritz 3 program, examining
100,000 positions per second, tied for first place with Kasparov, ahead of
16 other grandmasters, at a five-minute tournament in Munich, Ger.
Later in the year Kasparov was eliminated from a game/25 tournament
in London after losing a two-game match against Genius running on a
Pentium personal computer.

In 1991 Deep Thought’s team said the program, renamed Deep Blue,
would soon be playing at the equivalent of a 3000 rating (compared with
Kasparov’s 2800), but this proved excessively optimistic. The main
improvement was in the computer running the chess program. IBM
developed, and used chess to test, a sophisticated new multiprocessing
system (later used at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Ga., U.S., to
predict the weather) that employed 32 microprocessors, each with six
programmable chips designed specifically for chess. Deep Thought, by
comparison, had one microprocessor and no extra chips. The new
hardware enabled Deep Blue to consider as many as 50 billion positions
in three minutes, a rate that was about a thousand times faster than
Deep Thought’s.

Deep Blue made its debut in a six-game match with PCA champion
Kasparov in February 1996. The $500,000 prize fund and IBM’s live game
coverage at their World Wide Web site attracted worldwide media
attention. The Kasparov–Deep Blue match in Philadelphia was the first
time a world champion had played a program at a slow (40 moves in two
hours) time format. Deep Blue won the first game, but Kasparov
modified his style and turned the later games into strategic, rather than
tactical, battles in which evaluation was more important than
calculation. He won three and drew two of the remaining games to win
the match 4–2. (See Game 25.)

In a six-game rematch held May 3–11, 1997, in New York City, an

upgraded Deep Blue was able to consider an average of 200 million
positions per second, twice its previous speed. Its algorithm for
considering positions was also improved with advice from human
grandmasters.

By adopting a new set of conservative openings, Kasparov forced Deep

Blue out of much of its prematch preparation. After resigning the second
game, in a position later found to be drawable, Kasparov said he “never
recovered” psychologically. With the match tied at one win, one loss,
and three draws, Deep Blue won the decisive final game in 19 moves.

Computer extension of chess theory

Computers have played a role in extending the knowledge of chess. In

1986 Kenneth Thompson of AT&T Bell Laboratories reported a series of
discoveries in basic endgames. By working backward from positions of
checkmate, Thompson was able to build up an enormous number of
variations showing every possible way of reaching the final ones. This
has been possible with only the most elementary endgames, with no
more than five pieces on the board. Thompson’s research proved that
certain conclusions that had remained unchallenged in endgame books
for decades were untrue. For example, with best play on both sides, a
king and queen can defeat a king and two bishops in 92.1 percent of the
initial starting positions; this endgame had been regarded as a hopeless
drawn situation. Also, a king and two bishops can defeat a king and lone
knight in 91.8 percent of situations—despite human analysis that
concluded the position was drawn. Thompson’s research of some five-
piece endgames required considering more than 121 million positions.

Because of their ability to store information, computers had become

invaluable to professional players by the 1990s, particularly in the
analysis of adjourned games. However, computers have severe limits. In
the 1995 PCA championship, Kasparov won the 10th game with a heavily
analyzed opening based on the sacrifice of a rook. According to his aides,
the prepared idea was tested on a computer beforehand, and the
program evaluated the variation as being in the opponent’s favour until
it had reached the end of Kasparov’s lengthy analysis.

The availability of top-notch microcomputers poses a major problem for

postal chess. A principal difference between over-the-board chess and
all forms of correspondence chess is that in the latter players are
permitted to analyze a position by moving the pieces and by consulting
reference books. By the 1990s most serious postal players used a
computer database containing thousands of games categorized by
opening moves. However, if the use of computers is extended to finding
the best moves in the middlegame or endgame, postal chess becomes
computer chess. The International Correspondence Chess Federation
said in 1993 that “the existence of chess computers is a reality and for
correspondence chess the use of chess computers cannot be
controlled.”

Chess composition

Chess compositions are created positions in which one side, usually

White, moves first and<script
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perform a task. The reader is called upon to find the task’s solution.
There are three basic forms of composition depending on the type of
task.

In studies, White is asked to reach a desired result, either a clear

winning or drawn position, in an indeterminate number of moves. In
problems, White is asked to force checkmate in a specific number of
moves. Black is required to put up the best defense in the solutions of
both studies and problems. In the third category, heterodox problems
and related retrograde analysis, the reader is asked to perform unusual
tasks.

In each case, criteria such as originality, difficulty, beauty, and the

absence of extraneous pieces distinguish good compositions from great
and poor ones. Also, the existence of a second solution, or cook, sharply
reduces the quality of a composition. Under these and other criteria,
composers of studies and problems have competed in organized
tournaments since the middle of the 19th century. The world chess
federation, FIDE, awards the titles of International Master and
International Grandmaster of Chess Composition based on having
studies and problems published in the FIDE albums.

Studies about chess

Composed studies are usually positions with a small number of pieces

and may resemble an endgame from actual play. A position always is
accompanied by a stipulation, either “White to play and win” or “White
to play and draw.” There is no time limit on achieving a position that is
objectively won or drawn.

Such a won position is not necessarily one leading to immediate

checkmate but one with a prohibitively large advantage of material for
White. A drawn position may be one in which Black lacks enough
material to win or in which White has created an impenetrable fortress
for his pieces or has obtained some kind of positional advantage, such as
the ability to give perpetual check, that prevents Black from winning.
Solutions are often elaborate. Some compositions beginning with a bare
minimum of pieces involve a solution of more than 20 moves.

The first studies, called manṣūbāt and dating from Arabic and Persian
manuscripts, were intended to instruct players on how to win
endgames. Themes of instructional studies, such as the pursuit of more
than one aim at a time, are often used in practical play to turn what
otherwise would be a draw or loss into a win. Highly praised studies
have been composed with a minimum of material, such as two kings and
only two or three pawns.

Studies have also been based on arresting or unusual ideas, including

underpromotion, stalemate, or sacrifices. Vladimir Korolkov, a
celebrated Russian composer, published a study entitled “Excelsior” in
1958 in which White wins only by making six consecutive captures by a
pawn. The solution was illustrated by verses from Longfellow’s poem
“Excelsior.”

Positions with practical application were known as early as the 9th

century and were particularly popular in the 19th century. Many leading
players were also accomplished study composers, including the world
champions Max Euwe, Mikhail Botvinnik, and Vasily Smyslov, as well as
Paul Keres and Jan Timman.
ANNEXTURE

Chess starting positon

Iranian chess set

World’s first chess computer

Knight Templar playing chess, Librode los juegos,1283

Types of chess pieces

Glinski’s hexagonal chess, a chess variant popular in the 1930s

Grand master Garry Kasparov,former World Chess Champion

World Chess Champions Jose Raul Capablanca

(left) and Emanuel Lasker in 1925
Wilhelm Steintiz, the Noble chess players, Germany
first World Chess Champion (B.C. 1320)

Andr Philidor Two kings & two queens from

the Lewis Chessmen at the
British Museum
Vishwanathan anand

Brass chess set

Ancient chess set

European queen ancient chess Modern queen

Ashtapada board

Arabic chess set

Xiangqi board

Senet board game

Russian chess set

Liubo board game

English chess set

Chaturanga
Map, before 500 BCE-4-army chaturanaga was played

French chess set

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Web resources

 www.wikipedia.com
 www.google.com
 www.britanica.com
 www.meriam-webster.com
 www.slu.edu.org
 www.powa.org
 www.enssortment.com