Title of paper: Chess Playing Agents: A Problem Analysis

Authors: Francisco Mota, Alex Rottinghaus
University of Northern Iowa
fmota91@gmail.com



Reviewer:
PaulSheehan Jeyaraj
E-mail: pjey003@aucklanduni.ac.nz


Reference:
Berliner, H., Kopec, D., and Northam, E. 1990. A taxonomy of concepts for evaluating chess strength. In Proceedings of the 1990 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing (New York, New York, November 12 - 16, 1990). Conference on High Performance Networking and Computing. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 336- 343. Dennett, D. C. "Higher games: on the 10th anniversary of Deep Blue's triumph over Garry Kasparov in chess, a prominent philosopher of mind asks, what did the match mean?. ." Technology Review (Cambridge, Mass.). 110.5 (Sept-Oct 2007): 98(3). Academic OneFile. Gale. University of Northern Iowa. 28 Mar. 2009 Hamilton, S. N., The Last Chess Game: Computers, Media Events, and the Production of Spectacular Intelligence. Canadian Review of American Studies, 30(3), 339-360. EBSCOhost. March 28, 2009. Lassabe, N., Sanchez, S., Luga, H., and Duthen, Y. 2006. Genetically programmed strategies for chess endgame. In Proceedings of the 8th Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (Seattle, Washington, USA, July 08 - 12, 2006). GECCO '06. ACM, New York, NY, 831-838. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1143997.1144144 Levy D. Before the Jet Age. Computer Games I, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1988, 116-153. McPartland M., Gallagher M. Learning to be a Bot: Reinforcement Learning in Shooter Games. In The Fourth Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference, (Stanford California, 2008), AAAI Press, Newell, A. Shaw, J. C. Simon, H. A. Chess-Playing Programs and the Problem of Complexity. Computer Games I, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1988, 89-115. Not so Smart. Economist, 336 (8309). 11 EBSCOhost. March 28, 2009. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true &db=afh&AN=9019906&site=ehost-live Schaeffer, J. "A Gamut of Games. " AI Magazine. 22.3 (Fall 2001): 29. Academic OneFile. Gale. University of Northern Iowa. 28 Mar. 2009

Keywords:
chess ai agents program review problem analysis paper

Summary:
The paper covers the history of chess agents and analyses their evolution into the modern era. The analysis starts with Shannon's proposal in the 1950s and ends with deep blue(1997). It describes what makes a chess agent tick and concludes how the futue of chess agents might be.


Related Papers:
Shannon, C. E. A Chess-Playing Machine. in Levy D. Computer Games I, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1988, 81-88.

Evaluation:
The paper content is pretty good and covers almost all aspects of a chess agent. A fairly advanced chess player can easily understand it.

Some critical comments are below:
1. The paper does not have an intro to the chess terms and concepts used in it. It requires a deep knowledge of the game for a reader interested in AI to understand parts of it.
2. The analysis shifts from greenblatt to deep blue without considering important predecessors of deep blue.
3. No formal description of the chess tree is included.
4. No sample positions are included to better illustrate their points
5. Important components of a chess agent such as the 'opening book tree' and 'endgame pattern databases' are either ignored or neglected in the analysis.