Turochamp

Overview

Turochamp is a chess program developed by Alan Turing and David Champernowne in 1948. It was created as part of research by the pair into computer science and machine learning. Turochamp is capable of playing an entire chess game against a human player at a low level of play by calculating all potential moves and all potential player moves in response, as well as some further moves it deems considerable. It then assigns point values to each game state, and selects the move resulting in the highest point value. Turochamp is the earliest known computer game to enter development, but was never completed by Turing and Champernowne, as its algorithm was too complex to be run by the early computers of the time such as the Automatic Computing Engine.