What got you into computer chess?

[RubiChess]

I got a Commodore VIC 20 and this http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/ ... -II-Chess/ game cartridge when I was 13 years.
I learned some chess basics at the same age from a book.
Later I wrote some "four in a row" program on a C64 at age of 16 and had some lessons about gaming theory in university at age of 22.

Then I lost contact for half of my life before someone at work pointed me to TCEC and chessprogramming scene when I asked him about a post he made at facebooks TCEC page.

Andreas

[S.Taylor]

What got you into computer chess? Battle Chess, a love of programming, and no chess set.

I used to think it was the closest to human thing you could get in machine form.
I have never yet come across another person who felt the same way as me.

I was also crazy over being able to know what a grandmaster would suggest in some positions.

Again, no one EVER felt like me. As far as i know.

Also, i was longing to see world famous combinations that made history, come out of my own bed room (ie my own private room).

[reflectionofpower]

Chess Challenger 1,3, Novag 1.6, Mach III, then the software.

[A Distel]

What got you into computer chess? Battle Chess, a love of programming, and no chess set.

The ability of computers to outperform humans!

[mclane]

MK1, mkv, Mephisto 1

[Colin-G]

My interest in computer chess really took off after I discovered Winboard and all the free chess engines in 2000.

[Jouni]

It was 1982/83 when I played Sargon in my cousin's Commodore. It was amazing and I have not lost my interest so far.

[Dann Corbit]

Many things.

My dad taught me chess when I was fairly young.

The Fischer/Spassky match was riveting.

In 1976 someone brought a computer chess program to our high school as a demonstration. It played awful chess, but it was interesting that a machine could play chess.

In the mid 90's I fooled around with:
GnuChess
Crafty
Arasan

The Deep Blue match

Lots of other things.

[George Sobala]

Read David Levy’s book on Computers and Chess in 1977 and was inspired to write an engine in Fortran, typed onto punched cards, to run on an IBM 370, 5 seconds of compute per move.

[CRoberson]

I learned to play chess when I saw two other people playing an interesting looking game but yet unknown to me in 1969.
They said they were playing chess and one of them said he couldn't teach me because I was too dumb to learn chess.
We were in the elementary school library, so I read the chess sections in Compton's Encyclopedia, Collier's Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Britanica.
After that I played chess weekly from about a month or two until the teachers took the chess sets away. They didn't like us playing chess.

In the early 1980s in undergrad, I had an AI class which was fascinating. Normal programming and programming problems were boringly easy but AI
required you to really turn your head upside down to get an elegant solution. At that time, I was reading the game code of several games that
came with the universities PDP-11/34 minicomputer. That stuff was cool. Also, I got into playing chess again after undergrad in the late 1980's
and humans could be the best computers - CXG Super Enterprise - I bought one then and it still works, Fidelity Excellence....
Also, BattleChess and ChessMaster for the Nintendo along with Sargon for the PC. That put the icing on the cake. Why could humans
beat computers? Were humans really searching that deep? So, I started reading chess books on strategy and positional chess. I did this for
a decade and read dozens of books.

While in grad school, I studied all the required classes OS, Compilers, Computability Theory/Algorithms and CPU design. Also, I took classes in other areas like Neural Networks. I immediately thought of Neural Nets as a position eval and other things for chess programs. I did some
experimental work and it was a bust. My 25 MHz 386 SX with a Cyrix math coprocessor was not fast enough to ever be effective. So that was abandoned.

When I wrote Noonian in the 1990s it had a huge position evaluator which caused it to be very slow. It played the opening and early middlegame
very well but would loose to speed after that.

Since then, I still spend most of my computer chess programming time working on the position eval. That is where the real AI is. That is where you
give the program a personality and style.