Abstract
Who is the best chess player of all time? Chess players are often interested in this question that has never been answered authoritatively, because it requires a comparison between chess players of different eras who never met across the board. In this contribution, we attempt to make such a comparison. It is based on the evaluation of the games played by the World Chess Champions in their championship matches. The evaluation is performed by the chess-playing program Crafty. For this purpose we slightly adapted Crafty. Our analysis takes into account the differences in players’ styles to compensate the fact that calm positional players in their typical games have less chance to commit gross tactical errors than aggressive tactical players. Therefore, we designed a method to assess the difficulty of positions. Some of the results of this computer analysis might be quite surprising. Overall, the results can be nicely interpreted by a chess expert.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Hsu, F., Anantharaman, T., Campbell, M., Nowatzyk, A.: A grandmaster chess machine. Scientific American 263(4), 44–50 (1990)
Hyatt, R.: The Crafty ftp site (2006), ftp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt/
Kasparov, G.: My Great Predecessors, Parts 1–5. Everyman Chess, London, (2003–2006). ISBN 1857444043
Sonas, J.: Chessmetrics (2005), http://www.chessmetrics.com
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Guid, M., Bratko, I. (2007). Computer Analysis of Chess Champions. In: van den Herik, H.J., Ciancarini, P., Donkers, H.H.L.M.(. (eds) Computers and Games. CG 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4630. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75538-8_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75538-8_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-75537-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-75538-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)