COKO III and the future of inter-snap judgment communication

Abstract

A grandmaster usually spends a lifetime collecting knowledge or information about the game. Some of this knowledge is given to COKO in the form of a 12,000 line FORTRAN program. Using this knowledge COKO plays very poorly but at the super rate of approximately one move/sec. The use of a brute force selective tree searching procedure yields an order of magnitude improvement in performance at the standard rate of 3 min./move. Perhaps three orders of magnitude additional improvement is needed to defeat the world champion, a gap which must be bridged, if ever, by programming more chess knowledge into the machine. In addition “inter-snap judgment communication” is described as a natural, powerful procedure frequently used by humans to guide their selective search and as a point of emphasis for future development.