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Results of Acm's Eighteenth Computer Chess

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MEETINGREPORT RESULTS OF ACM’S EIGHTEENTH COMPUTER CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP MONTY NEWBORN and DANNY KOPEC CHIPTEST-M, a chess-playing computer program devel- at least one level deeper than its opponents searched oped by a team of three graduate students at Carnegie- and apparently too much of an advantage for any of Mellon University, took first place at ACM’s 18th North them to overcome. The program is only two years old American Computer Chess Championship held at the and has less chess knowledge than its main rivals, but ACM/IEEE-CS Fall Joint Computer Conference in Dal- the enormous tree that it searches more than makes up las, Texas last October. With the strongest field ever for these shortcomings. assembled for a computer chess event, including cur- Hsu expects to improve the program over the coming rent World Champion CRAY BLITZ and former World year by introducing parallelism. His chip can be repli- Champion BELLE, CHIPTEST-M overpowered the field cated, and with the talent that has created the current of 12 with a perfect 4-0 performance to capture the version, a parallel version can be anticipated which $2000 first place prize. En route to winning the champi- will be significantly stronger. The program was as- onship, the program defeated CRAY BLITZ in the third signed a 2584 performance rating at the Dallas event round and then routinely disposed of SUN PHOENIX in by Ken Thompson’s rating program. This salys that the final fourth round. CRAY BLITZ finished in second CHIPTEST-M was playing at the level of a Grandmaster place, while SUN PHOENIX settled for third. Both in this tournament. won three games and lost one, but CRAY BLITZ was Not participating in the event was HITECH, winner awarded second place based on tiebreaking points. of the ACM’s 18th NACCC held in Denver in 1985 and BELLE withdrew from the tournament after three winner of the 1987 Pennsylvania State Championship rounds when a hardware problem surfaced. (for humans!). HITECH, also developed at Carnegie- CHIPTEST-M was developed by Carnegie-Mellon Mellon University, is playing very strong chess as well, University graduate students Thomas Anantharamam, and prior to the Dallas event the two programs played a Feng-hsiung Hsu, and Murray Campbell. Hsu, the number of unofficial scrimmages. leader, represented the group in Dallas and calmly CRAY BLITZ, the pre-tournament favorite, was watched his VLSI marvel waltz through each game. deprived of the Championship when it was defeated CHIPTEST-M is designed around a VLSI chip that by CHIPTEST-M in an exciting third round encounter. searches chess trees at a rate of approximately 500,000 CRAY BLITZ polished off its other three oplponents and positions per second, several times faster than any gained second place on tiebreaking points over SUN other program to date. On most moves the program was PHOENIX. CRAY BLITZ, the protege of Robert Hyatt, a able to carry out an exhaustive alpha-beta search to a graduate student at the University of Alaba:ma, Burt depth of nine or ten levels (or plies, or half moves) and Gower of the University of Southern Mississippi, and deeper along certain important tactical lines. That was Harry Nelson of Lawrence Radiation Laboraltories in Livermore, California, ran on a four processor, eight megaword Cray XMP located at Cray Research in 01988 ACMOOOl-0782/88/0800-0992 $1.50 Mendota Heights, Minnesota. 992 Communications of the ACM August 1988 Volume 31 Number 8 Meeting Report SUN PHOENIX, the work of Jonathan Schaeffer and interesting to note that every program was written Marius Olaffson of the University of Alberta, along with either in C or in assembly language. Five of the partici- CHIPTEST-M, were the only two programs to go into pating systems were at the site. Four used multiprocess- the final round of play with perfe.ct 3-0 scores, and thus ing systems, and three used special chess circuitry. their pairing was a simple necessity. SUN PHOENIX International Master Mike Valvo served as the Tour- ran on 14 SUN 4 workstations located at SUN Microsys- nament Director. Local assistance was provided by the tems in Mountain View, California. Search was divided Dallas Chess Club under the direction of Roger Johnson. up among the computers in such a way that a group On Tuesday, October 27th before the last round of of them were looking for moves leading to positional play, there was a Workshop on Computer Chess orga- advantages while the others were attempting to find nized by Tony Marsland where a number of partici- moves leading to tactical advantages. pants and researchers in the field made lo-15 minute David Levy and Mark Taylor’s program CYRUS 68K presentations. The diversity of the topics introduced won the trophy for being the “Best Small Computing and the discussion which followed provided for one of System.” CYRUS 68K ran on an IBM PC and finished the more successful workshops in many years. the tournament with an even 2-2 score. NOVAG X The ACM’s 19th North American Computer Chess (David Kittinger), running on a 6502-based microcom- Championship is scheduled to take place in Orlando, puter, and GNU Chess (Stuart Cracraft, John Stanback, Florida in conjunction with the ACM/IEEE Supercom- Jay Scott, and Jim Aspnes), running on a VAX 8650, also puter Conference held November 14-17, 1988. For finished with even scores, but lost to CYRUS 68K on more details, please write to Prof. M. Newborn, School tiebreaking points. of Computer Science, McGill University, 805 Sher- Final standings and information on the participants brooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec, Canada are listed in the table appearing in this report. It is H3A 2K6. Round 4 ACM’s Eighteenth NACCC 4. h3 dient of Black’s effort to gain equality in the Opening by strik- CHIPTEST-M (White) versus SUN This move may look unusual ing at White’s advanced central PHOENIX (Black) here, but in fact it is a standard chain before the weak pawn on e4 book move. The idea is to delay is captured. Caro-Kann Defense e4-e5 and enable Nf3 without having to worry about . Bg4. If 9. dxc5 Qa5+ 10. c3 Qxc5 4. e5? Black can enjoy a clear stra- This game is yet another demonstra- tegical buildup based on control While this game was being played, tion of the power of brute force. of f5 square square, e.g. h5, Valvo pointed out that he had Much of the play is under rather . Nh6 and . Nf5. played the White side of this vari- equal terms, but the Black chess ation against GM Andrew Soltis program is saddled with a small po- 4 . Bg7 and had found it difficult to dem- sitional weakness on move 20 which onstrate any advantage for White. ultimately spells its doom. The man- Now CHIPTEST-M is already out One worthwhile try here is ner in which this is exploited, how- of its relatively small book. With 11. Bf4. Then on 11. .Bxe5? ever, is noteworthy. White regroups time, there can be no doubt that 12. Bxe5 QxeS 13. Qd8+ Kxd8 his forces a number of times before such standard developing moves 14. Nxf 7+ wins for White as embarking on the decisive maneu- will be added to the expansion of pointed out by Valvo. However, ver. Much of White’s play between its book. Black can simply reply with moves 23 and 33 seems very quiet. 11. * . O-O 12, Nxe4 Qc7 when he White’s winning infiltration comes 5. Nf3 can be sure to recover his pawn quickly after 34. f 5. with an equal game. This is SUN The first move out of book for PHOENIX’s first move out of its 1. e4 c6 2. d4 d5 3. Nc3 g6 CHIPTEST-M and it devotes six book. SUN PHOENIX, running on minutes to it, terminating search 14 SUN 3 workstations, assigns a Black’s opening is a cross between in the middle of the tenth itera- small subset of the 24 to searching a Caro-Kann (characterized by tion. in parallel for material gains 1.*.. c6 and 2. d5 in answer to alone, and they searched to a 1. e4 and a Modern Defense (char- 5. Nf6 6. e5 Ne4 7. Nxe4 dxe4 depth of 10 levels on this move. acterized by . g6, . c6 and 6.Ng5c5 The remaining computers, which I . d6 or . d5 and the delay of use the usual complex scoring development of the King’s Knight. This move is an important ingre- function, searched in parallel to a August 1988 Volume 31 Number 8 Communications of the ACM 993 Meeting Report depth of eight levels. When the with a slight though long term . Bb4 32. a3 Ba5 :33. Ng5 Re8 two groups of computers disagree weakness in the isolated “a” and &gure 1) on the move to make, SUN PHOE- “c” pawns. The theoretical superi- NIX invokes various procedures to ority of bishop over knight is not After SUN PHOENIX played resolve their differences. Further, a significant factor here because 33. Re8, CHIPTEST-M’s score when the endgame is reached (in the bishop cannot find a secure on 34. f 5 jumped to tlhe highest this game on move 19 according to and active central outpost in this level since the opening. It believes SUN PHOENIX) SUN PHOENIX ending. SUN PHOENIX believes it it is ahead by about a third of a stops setting aside a subset of the is ahead by approximately one- pawn. SUN PHOENIX’s scores workstations to look for material quarter of a pawn.
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