PART 1 • Chess and computers – they go together like chocolate and peanut butter
expensive to operate in the late 1940's, and the huge number of people
(primarily government workers and academics) who needed access to
them made using a computer for anything comparatively frivolous (like
running a chess program) impossible. Consequently, Turing was never
able to run Turochamp on an actual machine, but in 1951 he was able
to have Turochamp play a human player by making all of the program's
calculations manually.
Turochamp wasn't a sophisticated program; here's a short list
of the program's parameters (reproduced here verbatim from
a copyrighted article I wrote in 2011 and based on information
in Levy and Newborn's book How Computers Play Chess):
• Mobility: For the pieces other than Kings and pawns, add the square
roots of the number of moves that the piece can make, counting a
capture as two moves.
• Piece safety: If a Rook, Bishop, or Knight is defended once, add 1
point; add 1.5 points if it is defended twice.
• King mobility: Use the same method as above, but don’t count
castling.
• King safety: Deduct x points for a vulnerable King, with x being the
number of moves that a Queen could move if it were on the same
square as the one occupied by the King.
• Castling: When evaluating a move, add 1 point if castling is still
possible after the move is made. Add another point if castling is
immediately possible or if the castling move has just been performed.
• Pawn credit: Score 0.2 points for each square advanced, plus 0.3
points for each pawn defended by one or more non-pawns.
• Checks and mate threats: Score 1 point for the threat of mate and a
half-point for a check.
• Point Values for Material: Pawn=1, Knight=3, Bishop=3.5, Rook=5,
Queen=10
Using these parameters, you could actually play a “test” game with (or
as) Turochamp yourself, although it would be very slow going since each
possible move in any position would have to be evaluated by hand using the above criteria. In fact, Turochamp's only “game” was abandoned
before it was finished because it took such a long time for Turing to
hand-calculate the moves.
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