1959 - The IBM 704 Plays Chess Against a Human

A look back to the early days. :sunglasses:

youtu.be/iT_Un3xo1qE

A billion calculation per day. (Max number of calculations for the system)

And it takes only 8 minutes to calculate 2800 positions.

:laughing:

Not sure a modern chess engine can even be made to brute force play. (Maybe, I’m not in the mood to check it out, since its nearly 1 am, and I"m about to crash.)

I remember back in my Amiga days… the Amiga 500 could do about 50,000 positions/second, and the Amiga 3000 could do it even faster.

Of course, number of positions calculated has been passe for many years, since *brute force hasn’t been a real factor for many years either.

*that is, a chess engine calculating every possible future position/line from its current position, regardless if the line is winning or losing.

Now a phone app chess game can beat that array of 1959 computers.

I think Stockfish for the iPhone is ~2500 elo. (According to the recent issue of Chess Life).

And of course, as newer versions of iPhones come out, that rating is a bit of a moving target. The recent launch of the iPhone 4S has 7x faster graphics and is now duel core. Which I’d think won’t take long for someone to program a multi-core version of the iPhone Stockfish.

I suspect by 2015, iPhone/Androids will easily surpass 3000 elo, bringing roughly to what Fritz and Shredder were circa 2007. Although its hard to tell since the “base” used for chess engines is also a moving target, which also means that chess engines in general have a hard time getting over 3200 elo.
Currently Shredder 12 ( fixed at 2800 elo) is used as the “base” for at least *IPON ratings chart, if I remember correctly.

IPON turns ponder on, and only uses a single core to rate all engines, even multi-core engines.

Did you note how many keystrokes it took to input a single move? Probably a whole array of binary toggles to say “(7,4) to (5,4).”

It was almost certainly input using the punched card.

It sure looked like he was using a front panel for interactive input.

I prefer Robbie the Robot of “The Forbidden Planet” to the IBM 704. Robbie could make bourbon. A lot more talented machine than the 704. :slight_smile:

And he could make and carry tons of lead alloy shielding. But still, B9 got the better of him in Lost in Space.

Love the movie, but its still odd to see Leslie Nielsen as a young, dashing starship captain.