OVERVIEW

I was, during the spring of 1965, in graduate school in the Northeast, and as the weather was pleasant, not cold as it sometimes is in Boston, the window of the spacious room I shared with another engineering student was open to the famous New England sunshine. We had some time for leisure, and since my roommate ^[*] was one of the highest ranked chess players in the United States, he proposed to teach me the game. I should make it clear at the outset that although I knew enough not to confuse knights with bishops and by sustained effort could move each piece properly, I really have neither the temperament nor the aptitude to play chess. I was, as my roommate constantly reminded me, a complete patzer when it came to the game.

Although chess is a complicated game, in theory, perfect play is possible. In principle, what an engineer would call a complete game tree can be constructed for the game of chess. By exhaustive enumeration of all the legal first moves by white, followed by all of the legal responses by black to each of white's moves, then white's new responses to each of black's moves, and so forth, every possible game can be configured as a tree. Next a well-defined operation called min-maxing the game tree from the bottom up would allow the perfect game to be identified. This procedure is well understood and guaranteed to be successful. Even the smallest computer can...