Results of ACM's eighteenth computer chess championship

Abstract

CHIPTEST-M, a chess-playing computer program developed by a team of three graduate students at CarnegieMellon University, took first place at ACM’s 18th North American Computer Chess Championship held at the ACM/IEEE-CS Fall Joint Computer Conference in Dallas, Texas last October. With the strongest field ever assembled for a computer chess event, including current World Champion CRAY BLITZ and former World Champion BELLE, CHIPTEST-M overpowered the field of 12 with a perfect 4-0 performance to capture the $2000 first place prize. En route to winning the championship, the program defeated CRAY BLITZ in the third round and then routinely disposed of SUN PHOENIX in the final fourth round. CRAY BLITZ finished in second place, while SUN PHOENIX settled for third. Both won three games and lost one, but CRAY BLITZ was awarded second place based on tiebreaking points. BELLE withdrew from the tournament after three rounds when a hardware problem surfaced. CHIPTEST-M was developed by Carnegie-Mellon University graduate students Thomas Anantharamam, Feng-hsiung Hsu, and Murray Campbell. Hsu, the leader, represented the group in Dallas and calmly watched his VLSI marvel waltz through each game. CHIPTEST-M is designed around a VLSI chip that searches chess trees at a rate of approximately 500,000 positions per second, several times faster than any other program to date. On most moves the program was able to carry out an exhaustive alpha-beta search to a depth of nine or ten levels (or plies, or half moves) and deeper along certain important tactical lines. That was