AI in Chess | The History of AI in Chess 

We are entering the era of AI (artificial intelligences), where they are being used in all areas of our lives, in chess they are also being used or rather AI have already been in the world of chess for some time, so today we will know the history of AI in chess.

Artificial intelligences in chess are not used to ask questions like GPT chat or to create images, in chess AIs are used for training players, especially professional players. Being more specific it is used to find the best moves within the positions to then use that knowledge and strategies against their opponents.

But as we already mentioned, the idea of AI in chess has been around for a while, so today we are going to know the history.

The forerunner in AI in chess

The first person who had the idea of something similar to AI and who dedicated his whole life in search of it was the world champion and chess patriarch Mikhail Botvinnik. Master Botvinnik sought to create a computer program that could play and make decisions just like us, with creativity, emotions, past experiences, personality and everything that happens in our brains when we have to make a decision.

But this was an almost impossible task since in Botvinnik's time the technology was not as advanced as it is now in our time and yet there is no such thing as something that can mimic the decision making of a human being.

Chess Engines

A few years later, thanks to IBM, one of the first chess engines called Deep Blue appeared.

It is important not to confuse AI with chess engines, although both perform the same function, the way they make their decisions is very different. Chess engines use brute force to find the best moves, in other words, the engines calculate all the possible moves in the position to find the best one, while the AI to find the best move of the position is based on their learning and past experiences, in addition to the super speed calculation they are able to perform.

Deep blue was one of the first engines that had the ability to play chess at a competitive level, so competitive that he got to play two mach against one of the best players of the moment, against the world champion Garry Kasparov himself multiple times, besides being considered one of the best chess players of all time.

In the first mach Garry won against the machine that literally had just been born, but in the second mach a year later, where they had time to improve it with what they had learned from the previous mach, Deep Blue managed to impose itself, leaving us some small samples of what would be the chess engines of today.

Arrival of Stockfich and AlphaZero

Thanks to the appearance of Deep Blue many people and companies began to develop and program their own chess engines. Among those who came out one of the most famous chess engines of today, we are talking about stockfish, the chess engine occupied by almost all the chess world.

Google was not far behind, but they took it a step further, they created the first chess AI that was able to learn strategies and strategy on its own, they just gave it the basic chess moves. AlphaZero learned by playing against itself and remembering the best of each game to improve its decision making.

Today AlphaZero is the strongest AI capable of playing chess and in order to run this AI we need a computer with high processing power.

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