Chess (Dietrich Prinz)

Chess, also known as Robot Chess and Mate-in-Two, was a chess program developed by German scientist Dietrich Prinz, which first ran in November 1951 on the Ferranti Mark 1 at the University of Manchester. It is regarded as one of the earliest efforts toward developing computer-based chess program and was directly inspired by Alan Turing’s theoretical chess program Turochamp, which was never implemented on a computer.

As part of a collaboration between Ferranti and the University of Manchester, British computing pioneer Dietrich Prinz contributed to the development of the Ferranti Mark I and its prototypes, the SSEM and the Manchester Mark 1. Prinz began developing his chess program on the Ferranti Mark 1 in 1949, and it became operational in November 1951. Due to the machine's limited capabilities, playing a chess game against the computer was impossible, forcing Prinz to focus solely on endgame studies, specifically mate-in-two problems. Additionally, the rules were significantly simplified, omitting castling, two-square pawn moves, en passant captures, and pawn promotion. The program also did not differentiate between checkmate and stalemate. Prinz opted for an exhaustive search method, which required evaluating thousands of possible moves in every game. The program was significantly slower than a human player, taking nearly fifteen minutes per move. The primary causes of this slowness were the data transfers between magnetic memory, electronic memory, and the program's testing procedures.

Despite its simplicity, the program holds historical significance as the first computer chess program to run on a fully operational computer. Prinz did not develop another chess program, possibly due to the increasing demands of his work at Ferranti, and his chess program is now considered lost.