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"I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'Science Fiction' and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."
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This famous story was written by Ambrose Bierce in 1910. In it, you encounter the first chess playing automaton - a fully automated chess machine. You also first encounter the problems that humans have when they face superior machines.
Read it if you like; Moxon's Master is available on the web (in the public domain).
Compare to the robotic chess expert from First He Died (Time and Again) (1951), by Clifford Simak. This is the first reference that I know of for the idea that machines are unbeatable by humans at chess.
This story may have been inspired by Wolfgang von Kempelen's remarkable mechanical chess player, which was created in 1770. Incredibly, it beat a number of chess experts in public matches. However, the real genius behind the automaton chess player was an assistant concealed inside the cabinet.
The first references to chess-playing computers by scientists were made by Konrad Zuse in the early 1940's and by Alan Turing in 1945. Zuse reputedly wrote a chess program in the early 1940's using PlanKalkuel, the first high-level computer language (also created by Zuse). Claude Shannon described in 1949 how to program a computer for chess, proposing basic strategies for limiting the number of possibilities to be considered ("trimming the tree"). Turing wrote a computer chess program in 1950 (Turing was a relatively weak player); this was the same year that he proposed what came to be known as the Turing Test for machine intelligence. Dietrich Prinz wrote a chess-playing program for a general purpose computer (the Manchester Ferranti) in 1951.
Computer chess was implemented on the Univac MANIAC I computer (80K storage, 2400 vacuum tubes, using a six-by-six chessboard and limited players (no bishops). The 11Khz processor (11,000 operations-per-second) took 12 minutes to search 4 moves deep.
The first chess program with a complete board and set of pieces was written in 1957 by Alex Bernstein at MIT on an IBM 704 (a 47Khz processor looked 4 moves deep in 8 minutes). Read more at Computer chess history.
Compare to robotic chess expert from First He Died (Time and Again) (1951) by Clifford Simak. Comment/Join this discussion ( 2 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
Timeline
Brin's 1990 Novel Earth Still Full Of Predictions
'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
Gaia - Why Stop With Just The Earth?
'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
Microsoft VASA-1 Creates Personal Video From A Photo
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
Splendid View Of Eclipse From Orbit Visualized And Repurposed By Arthur C. Clarke
'The area affected was five hundred kilometres across, and perfectly circular.'
Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick
'Hasan always pitched a Gauzy - a one-molecule-layer tent, opaque, feather-light, and very tough.'
SpaceX Wants A Moonbase Alpha
'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
Vast Apartment Living Will Get Even More Vast
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
NASA Wants Self-Driving Or Remote-Controlled Vehicles For Lunar Astronauts
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
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