Mater

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Mater, a chess mating combinations program, developed in the mid 60s by George Baylor and Herbert Simon, which was subject of Baylor's Masters thesis at Carnegie Mellon University. It was an early pioneering attempt in finding forced checkmates, employing "Artificial Intelligence" rather than "Brute-Force". Only moves which either put the enemy king in check (Mater I), or threaten mate in one (Mater II) were generated for the attacking side, searching those moves first which leave the minimum number of defensive replies, to eventually reduce the defender's mobility to zero.

=Abstract= This page is based on the description of Mater by George Baylor and Herbert Simon, 1966, A chess mating combinations program : The program reported here is not a complete chess player; it does not play games. Rather, it is a chess analyst limited to searching for checkmating combinations in positions containing tactical possibilities. A combination in chess is a series of forcing moves with sacrifice that ends with an objective advantage for the active side. A checkmating combination, then, is a combination in which that objective advantage is checkmate. Thus the program described here - dubbed MATER - given a position, proceeds by generating that class of forcing moves that put the enemy King in check or threaten mate in one move, and then by analyzing first those moves that appear most promising.

=History= The original mating combination program, as conceived by Herbert Simon and his son Peter Simon in 1962, was a hand simulation setting forth a strategy of search. It discovered mating combinations in 52 of the 129 positions collected in Fine's chapter of the mating attack from The Middlegame in Chess. Newell's and Prasad's IPL program, which could set up a chessboard, recorded positions, generated and made moves and testing their legality, was base of Mater I and in 1964 the revised Mater II programs. According to Monroe Newborn, Mater was ported to Fortran and incorporated into Cooper-Kozdrowicki program by Dennis Cooper and Ed Kozdrowicki : MATER is written by George Baylor and Simon in FORTRAN. It is able to search to great depths for checkmates. MATER is presently part of the Cooper-Kozdrowicki program. While MATER is an interesting program in its own right, the opportunity to checkmate one's opponent plays a relatively small computational part of the game of chess, and its inclusion in the Cooper-Kozdrowicki program does not seem to add measurably to the program's strength.

=Mater I= =Mater II=

=Board Representation= Mater was written in IPL V with its primary data structure of a list, and kept lists with a header (name) and attribute-value pairs for each square and piece to represent the board, where values for piece and square attributes are addresses (cells) of lists again, yielding in an extensive network of relations among squares and pieces:

=Move Generation= In A chess mating combinations program, Baylor and Simon further elaborate on move generation, with two tacks, corresponding to a one-many or many-one approach. In trying to find all checking moves, one could either radiate out from the enemy king, and for each square, search for a piece that can get there and check (one-many), or converge from the squares along the move directions of each attacking piece onto the enemy king's square (many-one). If there are many pieces on the board, the former tends to be more effective, if few, the latter.

=Processing Speed= Mater was written in an interpretive language IPL, without any attempts to provide a special machine-language representation for primitive board manipulation. The most difficult mates, requiring the examination of about 100 positions, were achieved in about 3 minutes on an IBM 7090.

=Namesake=
 * Mater by Valentin Albillo

=See also=
 * Astronomy
 * Chest
 * MAPP
 * Mate at a Glance
 * Mate-in-two
 * Mate Search
 * NSS
 * Perceiver

=Publications=
 * Herbert A. Simon, Peter A. Simon (1962). Trial and Error Search in Solving Difficult Problems: Evidence from the Game of Chess. Behavioral Science, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 425-429
 * George W. Baylor (1965). Report on a Mating Combinations Program. SDC Paper, No. SP-2150, System Development Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif.
 * George W. Baylor, Herbert A. Simon (1966). A chess mating combinations program. AFIPS Joint Computer Conferences, reprinted  in Herbert A. Simon (1979). Models of Thought. Yale University Press, pp. 181-200, in David Levy (ed.) (1988). Computer Chess Compendium.
 * George W. Baylor (1966). A Computer Model of Checkmating Behaviour in Chess. in Adriaan de Groot, Walter R. Reitman (eds.) (1966). Heuristic Processes in Thinking. International Congress of Psychology, Nauka, Moscow
 * Herbert Simon (1973). Lessons from Perception for Chess-Playing Programs (and Vice Versa). Computer Science Research Review 1972-73, pdf
 * Herbert Simon, William Chase (1973). Skill in Chess. American Scientist, Vol. 61, No. 4, reprinted in David Levy (ed.) (1988) Computer Chess Compendium, pdf
 * Max Bramer (1982). Finding Checkmates. Computer & Video Games, Spring 1982, pdf hosted by Mike Watters

=External Links=
 * mater - Wiktionary
 * Mater (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * Alma mater from Wikipedia
 * Alma mater (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * Stabat Mater from Wikipedia
 * Stata Mater from Wikipedia

=References=

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