1 A brief history of the computer chess tournaments: 19701975. - Background. - The tournaments. - The Soviet Union vs. USA match 196667. - First United States computer chess championship (New York 1970). - KAISSA vs. the Soviet Public (Moscow 1972). - First world computer chess championship (Stockholm 1974). - Fifth United States computer chess championship (San Diego 1974). - Sixth North American computer chess championship (Minneapolis 1975). - Significance. - 2 Human chess skill. - Should a computer be more like a man?. - The choice-of-move problem. - The role of perception. - The first few seconds. - Search through the tree of moves. - Visualizing positions. - Evaluation. - Motivation. - The road to mastery for man and machine. - 3 An introduction to computer chess. - Machine representation of the chess board. - Static evaluation functions. - The look-ahead procedure. - Backward pruning. - Quiescence. - Plausible-move generators. - Full-width searching. - The opening. - The endgame. - Improvement through competition. - Future prospects. - 4 CHESS 4. 5The Northwestern University chess program. - Background. - The development of CHESS 4. 0. - Data base. - Move generation. - Tree-searching strategy. - The evaluation function. - Tree searching in CHESS 4. 5. - Program performance. - Conclusions and perspective. - 5 PEASANT: An endgame program for kings and pawns. - The rules of play. - A description of the program. - The programs performance. - Final observations. - 6 Plans goals and search strategies for the selection of a move in chess. - Search strategies. - Search strategies in the movement of the pieces. - A program to play speed chess. - 7 The heuristic search: An alternative to the alpha-beta minimax procedure. - 8 Man and machine: Chess achievements and chess thinking. - Why program a computer toplay chess?. - Past achievements of computer-chess programs. - Chess thinking: Man versus machine. - Computer chess: Omens prospectives and values. - Concluding comments. - 9 Belle. - Background. - Chess-specific hardware. - Second generation. - Third generation. - The book. - An experiment. - Conclusion. - 10 Using chess knowledge to reduce search. - Overview of PARADISE. - Concepts and knowledge sources. - Plans. - Creating plans. - How detailed should plans be?. - Using plans to guide the search. - A typical medium-sized search. - Measuring PARADISE'S performance. - Summary and long-term prospects. - Appendix Chess 4. 5: Competition in 1976. - The Paul Masson American Chess Championship. - ACM Computer Chess Championships 1976. - Second Appendix Chess 4. 5 and Chess 4. 6: Competition in 1977 and 1978. - The Minnesota Open February 1977. - The First Wager Match with Levy April 1977. - The Second World Computer Championship August 1977. - Blitz Chess against Michael Stean in London September 1977. - Twin-Cities Open April 1978. - Walter Browne Simultaneous Exhibition May 1978. - Appendix to the second edition. - References and bibliography. Language: English