Computers in Chess

One of the top issues in the chess community today is the use of computers in chess. For the first 1000 years of the game, computers did not exist. Analysis was purely with a board and pieces. Famously, Frank Marshall sat in his house for 5 years in the early 1900s, only to come out and reveal the Marshall Gambit and win the United States Championship. Computers really came into the chess scene in around the 1950s, when the first digital computers were emerging. In the 1990s computers began to actually be a challenge to the top humans. Deep Thought premiered in 1988 with a rating of 2551. However, top humans had ratings of around 2800 and were still able to beat the computer. In 1996 the top supercomputer, Deep Blue faced off against world champion Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue beat kasparov 3.5-2.5, becoming the first computer ever to beat a human world champion.



Kasparov then claimed that a computer could not make some of the moves that Deep Blue made because "he knew how computers thought." He then tried to sue its operators saying one of the humans made the winning move and not the computer itself. Computers such as "Junior" and "Fritz" began to be sold in public and were able to at least draw with world champions. People suddenly were able to have the analysis of a world champion in their house. However there were many reprocussions.

Suddenly people were able to simply memorize computer moves. There were no more instancies of people like Frank Marshall figuring out new lines when computers could analyse 40 moves per second. Many people began to protest that these computers took away the "art" of chess because people could now just memorize moves. After every game, almost every player goes home and plugs the game into their computer to see where they made mistakes. This is considered a major money saver because it takes away some of the need for private coaching. Nonetheless, nowadays computers are a major part of chess that are here to stay. They currently out rate the world champion by over 700 rating points. They now have beaten every world champion since Karparov.