WCCC 1989

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The Sixth World Computer Chess Championship took place from May 28 to 31, 1989, in the Edmonton Convention Centre, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It was held in conjunction with Congress '89 of the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS), and was sponsored by Alberta Government Telephones (AGT). Tony Marsland's hard work in obtaining funds and recruiting attendees was apparent in the impressive chess expertise available to comment on the event - he further organized the New Directions in Game-Tree Search two-day workshop during the tournament. 24 teams from 9 nations participated. Canadian Chess Champion Kevin Spraggett was present commentating on the games along with David Levy, Mike Valvo, Danny Kopec, Julio Kaplan and David Slate. A large crowd of about 300 were on site during most of the games. Deep Thought won with a perfect score, winning all five games - runner up was BeBe.

=Final Standing= 6th World Computer Chess Championship 1989, Edmonton CA
 * SOS: Sum of Opponent Scores
 * SoDOS: Sum of Defeated Opponent Scores

=Participants= 6th World Computer Chess Championship 1989, Edmonton CA

=Photos= Feng-hsiung Hsu

Michie at the 6th WCCC

Thompson, Shannon, and Slate at the 6th WCCC

David Levy and Ken Thompson

Claude Shannon awards Feng-hsiung Hsu, first prize for Deep Thought

=Photos & Games= The game HiTech vs Deep Thought from the 5th (and last) round Hans Berliner, Murray Campbell, Feng-hsiung Hsu and Peter Jansen [Event "WCCC 1989"] [Site "Edmonton, Canada"] [Date "1989.05.31"] [Round "5"] [White "Hitech"] [Black "Deep Thought"] [Result "0-1"]

1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.Bf4 e6 4.e3 Nc6 5.Nbd2 Be7 6.h3 O-O 7.Be2 Nh5 8.Bh2 g6 9.O-O f5 10.Be5 Nxe5 11.Nxe5 Nf6 12.c4 c5 13.Ndf3 Bd6 14.a3 Qc7 15.Rc1 a5 16.Qb3 b6 17.Qa4 Bb7 18.Rc2 Kh8 19.cxd5 Bxd5 20.Rd1 Rad8 21.Bb5 Ne4 22.Nd7 Rg8 23.Nfe5 Rg7 24.Rd3 Be7 25.Rd1 h5 26.Rdc1 Bg5 27.Re1 Bh4 28.Rf1 Be7 29.Rfc1 g5 30.f3 Nf6 31.Kf1 g4 32.hxg4 hxg4 33.f4 Be4 34.Rd2 Nd5 35.Re2 Rh7 36.Ree1 Nxe3+ 37.Kg1 Nd5 38.Ng6+ Kg7 39.Nxe7 Qxf4 40.Nxf5+ exf5 41.Rxe4 Qxc1+ 42.Bf1 fxe4 43.Qb3 Rh1+ 44.Kxh1 Qxf1+ 45.Kh2 Rh8+ 46.Qh3 g3+ 47.Kxg3 Qf4# 0-1 Game and short analyze on Lichess.org :

=Honored Guests=
 * John McCarthy
 * Donald Michie

=Invited Guests=
 * Georgy Adelson-Velsky
 * Vladimir Arlazarov
 * Mikhail Donskoy
 * Hans Berliner
 * Monty Newborn
 * Claude Shannon
 * Ken Thompson

=Tournament Director=
 * Michael Valvo

=Workshop= The Workshop New Directions in Game Tree Search was organized by Tony Marsland and held in conjunction with the WCCC on May 29 and 30, 1989. Revised contributions of the workshop were published in Computers, Chess, and Cognition.

Session 1
The first session was disclosed by John McCarthy mentioning the often cited metaphor of computer chess as the Drosophila of artificial intelligence research, and attributed it to Alexander Kronrod :
 * Hans Berliner (1989). What is still needed in Game Tree Search. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search
 * Robert Levinson (1989). A Self-Learning, Pattern-Oriented Chess Program. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search
 * James Gillogly (1989). Transposition Table Collisions. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search
 * Harry Nelson (1989). Some Observations about Hash Tables in Cray Blitz. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search
 * Ingo Althöfer (1989). A Summary of some Results in Theoretical Game Tree Search and the Dreihirn-Experiment. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search
 * Anders Kierulf, Ken Chen, Jürg Nievergelt (1989). Smart Game Board and Go Explorer: A Case Study in Software and Knowledge Engineering. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search
 * Kiyoshi Shirayanagi (1989). A New Approach to Programming Go - Knowledge Representation and its Refinement in Go Programs. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search
 * Lynn Sutherland (1989). Load Balancing Search Problems on General-Purpose Multi-Computers. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search
 * Danny Kopec, Ed Northam, David Podber, Yehya Fouda (1989). The Role of Connectivity in Chess. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search, pdf
 * Monroe Newborn (1989). A Theorem Proving Program that Looks Like a Chess Program. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search
 * Mikhail Donskoy, Jonathan Schaeffer (1989). Perspectives on Falling from Grace. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search, pdf

Session 2
The second day began with opening remarks by Claude Shannon, who recalled that in the 40s relays rather than transistors were the state of the art. He still feft that games were an excellent test bed for understanding intelligence, and predicted that within the next 25 years computers would outplay the best humans at chess :
 * Donald Michie (1989). Automating the Discovery of Structure in Time-Varying Data. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search
 * Bob Herschberg, Jaap van den Herik, Patrick Schoo (1989). Verifying and Codifying Strategies in a Chess Endgame. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search
 * David Levy (1989). Evaluation Functions from Chess Endgame Databases. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search
 * Hermann Kaindl, Marcus Wagner, Helmut Horacek (1989). Comparing Various Pruning Algorithms on Very Strongly Ordered Game Trees. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search
 * Ed Felten (1989). Playing Against an Imperfect Opponent. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search
 * Peter Jansen (1989). Problematic Positions and Speculative Play. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search
 * Tony Marsland (1989). The Bratko-Kopec Test Revisited. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search

=Congress '89= John McCarthy and Donald Michie were invited speakers of the Congress '89 conference of the Canadian Information Processing Society on May 31, 1989. Their presentations were also published in Computers, Chess, and Cognition:
 * Donald Michie (1990). Brute Force in Chess and Science. Computers, Chess, and Cognition
 * John McCarthy (1990). Chess as the Drosophila of AI. Computers, Chess, and Cognition

=Poll= When will a Program beat the human Chess World Champion? A poll by David Levy during the WCCC 1989.

=See also=
 * ACM 1989
 * Computers, Chess, and Cognition

=Booklet=
 * Kings Move - Welcome to the 1989 AGT World Computer Chess Championship. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Courtesy of Peter Jennings, from The Computer History Museum, pdf

=Reports=

Tournament

 * Garth Courtois Jr. (1989). The Sixth World Computer-Chess Championship. ICCA Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2
 * Ray Keene (1989). Deep Thoughts from Edmonton. ICCA Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2
 * Jonathan Schaeffer (1990). 1989 World Computer Chess Championship. Computers, Chess, and Cognition, pp. 33-46

Workshop

 * Tony Marsland (1989). New Directions in Game-Tree Search. ICCA Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2
 * James Gillogly (1989). New Directions in Game-Tree Search - First Workshop Session. ICCA Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2
 * Murray Campbell (1989). New Directions in Game-Tree Search - Second Workshop Session. ICCA Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2
 * David Slate (1989). Invited Speakers: Donald Michie and John McCarthy. ICCA Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2

=Postings=
 * World Computer Chess Championship (the human side) by Feng-hsiung Hsu, rec.games.chess, June 04, 1989

=External Links=
 * 6th World Computer Chess Championship from the ICGA Tournament Database

=References=

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