Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is a branch of computer science concerned with making computers behave like humans. The term was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy at MIT.
Chess has been a very good environment for testing Artificial Intelligence techniques. In chess, all the information specific to the game is known to both players. It is not a game of chance.
Chess is a controlled environment in which the computer is presented with a situation and a goal, and the computer must find possibilities and make decisions to achieve this goal. Thus, decision-making algorithms and other such AI fields can be derived partly from chess programming.
In the beginning og chess programming, it was thought that computational speed was the computer's greatest asset. Early chess computers used brute-force routines and algorithms that relied on how fast the computer could process the moves on a board. It was thought that computers could process more exactly and more quickly than people.
Later, the minimax game tree evolved to become the most major component of the chess program. The minimax tree is the most successful and most popular of all AI techniques in board game programming. The levels of a minimax tree are commonly referred to as plies. At each ply, the turn or move switches to the other player.
With a full minimax tree, the computer looks ahead for each move to determine the best possible move. Several plies can overwelm a computer's memory, so computer programs are forced to estimate who is winning or losing by focusing on the top portion of the entire tree. To lessen the number of nodes the computer must examine, there are other algorithms such as Alpha-Beta pruning, Negascout, and MTD to assist with evaluation of each branch in the tree.
Other AI techniques for chess programming include neural networks, genetic algorithms, and collaborative computing.
In 2001, Steven Spielberg directed a movie called A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. After the narrator describes what happened in the past (ice caps melting, oceans rose, climate became chaotic, starvation, and the need for robots), Professer Allen Hobby (William Hurt) is lecturing at the Library-Cybertronics Corporation. He say, "To create an artificial being has been the dream of man since the birth of science. Not merely the beginning of the modern age, when our forebears astonished the world with the first thinkiing machines: primitive monsters that could play chess."
