ITEP Chess Program

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The ITEP Chess Program, an early Soviet chess program, developed since 1963 at Alexander Kronrod’s laboratory at the Moscow Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) by Georgy Adelson-Velsky, Vladimir Arlazarov, Anatoly Uskov, Alexander Zhivotovsky, A. Leman, M. Rozenfeld and Russian chess master Alexander Bitman, to run under the Soviet M-20 computer. According to the description of the Russian Virtual Computer Museum, the ITEP Chess Program was developed for the M-2, which seems wrong since all primary sources mention the Chess Program was written for the M-20.

=Shannon Type A= The ITEP Program already was a Shannon Type A program, encouraged by Kronrod’s "general recursive search scheme", and by Alexander Brudno's description of the Alpha-Beta algorithm.

=Stanford-ITEP= see Stanford-ITEP Match

In 1965, while John McCarthy visited the Soviet Union, he was challenged by Kronrod, who considered the Kotok-McCarthy-Program to be the best program in the United States at the time. At the end of 1966 the four game match was arranged between Kotok-McCarthy, running on a IBM 7090 computer, and the ITEP Program on a M-20. The match played over nine months was won 3-1 by the ITEP Program, which searches either three (first two games) or five plies (improved version) ahead.

=Photos= ITEP team during TV interview, November 24, 1967, M-20 in the background, from left: Anatoly Uskov, Georgy Adelson-Velsky, interviewer, Alexander Bitman, Vladimir Arlazarov and Alexander Zhivotovsky

=Kaissa= By 1971, Mikhail V. Donskoy joined with Arlazarov and Uskov to program its successor on an ICL System 4/70 at the Institute of Control Sciences, called Kaissa, which became the first World Computer Chess Champion at the WCCC 1974 in Stockholm.

=Quotes=

Shura-Bura
=See also=
 * Kaissa
 * Shura-Bura's Program

=Publications=
 * Alexander Kronrod (1964). Conversation Twelfth: Non-Computational Tasks. in book Conversations about programming, 2001 – 1st edition of the book
 * А.C. Кронрод (1964). Беседа двенадцатая: Невычислительные задачи. в кн. Беседы о программировании, 2001 – 1-е издание книги


 * Georgy Adelson-Velsky, Vladimir Arlazarov, Anatoly Uskov (1966). Programme playing chess. Symposium on theory and computing methods in the upper mantle problem, pdf
 * Vladimir Arlazarov, Alexander Bitman (1968). Will the machine beat man? Shakhmaty v SSSR, 2, 9–11
 * В.Л. Арлазаров, А.Р. Битман (1968). Обыграет ли машина человека? Шахматы в СССР, 2, 9–11


 * Georgy Adelson-Velsky, Vladimir Arlazarov, Alexander Bitman, Alexander Zhivotovsky and Anatoly Uskov (1970). Programming a Computer to Play Chess. Russian Mathematical Surveys, Vol. 25, pp. 221-262.

=External Links=
 * GreKo - Download has a listing of the ITEP Chess Program for the M-20 computer, hosted by Vladimir Medvedev
 * "Каисса" - Историю программы рассказывает один из ее создателей Михаил Донской - Kaissa by Mikhail Donskoy
 * Михаил Донской: Жизненный цикл программиста - ПОЛИТ.РУ (Russian) Mikhail Donskoy - The life cycle of a programmer, polit.ru August 20, 2008
 * The computer "plays" chess. TV news, November 24, 1967, YouTube Video
 * В шахматы "играет" ЭВМ. Телевизионные новости. Эфир 24.11.1967

=References= Up one Level