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Turochamp — Alan Turing and David Champernowne

1948 AD · Transmission: Silenced
ComputingAIMethodBritish

In 1948, Alan Turing together with his colleague David Champernowne at King's College, Cambridge, designed Turochamp, the first set of algorithmic rules conceived to play a complete game of chess, not just a specific endgame. No computer of the time had the capacity to run it, so Turing tested it "by hand": he himself acted as the processor, following the algorithm step by step with pencil and paper, taking up to half an hour per move. In 1952 he played a game against his colleague Alick Glennie using this method, and lost in 29 moves. Turing attempted to program it for the Ferranti Mark 1 in Manchester, but did not finish before his death in 1954. Turing and Claude Shannon met in person at Bell Labs in 1943 and explicitly discussed machines capable of playing chess, and met again around 1950 in Manchester, where Turing was programming his chess algorithm together with I.J. Good.

InstitutionKing's College, University of Cambridge
Historical regionUnited Kingdom
Primary sourceTuring, A.M. — "Chess", in Bowden, B.V. (ed.) Faster than Thought (1953), Chapter 25
Secondary sourceWikipedia (en) — "Turochamp"; Copeland, J. (ed.) — The Essential Turing (2004)
Original languageEnglish
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