© Mark Ollig
A software bot named Mittens has made a name for itself among those who push pawns, knights, bishops, rooks, queens, and kings across a chess board.
This chess-playing program is an intelligent bot (software robot) that has had an incredible impact on the chess world.
Also, do not be deceived by this bot’s appearance, which is of a cute little kitten with sparkling eyes and tiny furry paws.
This feline bot captivated the chess community, from casual players to tournament competitors.
While chess bots are not a new concept, there is something exceptional about Mittens that has made it stand out from the rest.
Why has this particular chess bot, based on artificial intelligence principles, been winning chess games against the world’s best players?
For one thing, Mittens features an ability to learn from experience and improve over time using algorithmic brute-force search, pattern matching, and empirical evaluation to determine the best chess moves.
Designed to play professional chess, Mittens has succeeded at the highest levels of chess competition, winning international chess tournaments, and is the only computer program awarded the title of Grandmaster by the International Computer Games Association.
Multiple chess techniques, including pattern recognition, game tree search, and neural networks, are utilized by Mittens.
This chess bot played multiple chess levels, from beginner to expert groups, and has consistently held its own against other chess programs.
Noted for its accuracy, ability, and speed in making moves, Mittens will adjust its chess strategy based on the opponent’s play and learn from its mistakes.
I learned that Mittens enjoys interjecting smart-alecky text comments during a game, especially after capturing an opponent’s chess piece.
Thousands of humans have competed against this grinning, furry-faced chess-playing bot – and only a handful have won.
It was 75 years ago when Alan Turing and David Champernowne researched machine learning at King’s College, Cambridge, UK, and wrote a chess program capable of playing against a human.
Although their program was initially written using a pencil and paper, it effectively demonstrated how a machine could “think” to play chess.
They named the program Turochamp, a combination of their surnames.
Turochamp analyzes two chess moves in advance using what is known as logical non-parametric supervised-learning algorithmic search decision trees. Yes, that’s quite the process name.
Years later, Champernowne said of their chess program, “Our general conclusion was that a computer should be fairly easy to program to play a game of chess against a beginner and stand a fair chance of winning, or at least reaching a winning position.”
During the June 23, 2012, celebration of Turing’s 100th birthday observance at the Alan Turing Centenary Conference in Manchester, UK, Turochamp was loaded into a modern-day computer.
Renowned chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, ranked the world’s number one chess player for 225 out of 228 months from 1986 until he retired from tournament competition in 2005, agreed to play against Turochamp.
Turochamp began the game well, that is until Kasparov took control and swiftly overpowered and captured many of Turochamp’s chess pieces.
He quickly closed in for the win using his queen and knight, checkmating Turochamp’s king in 16 moves.
“Although it’s only thinking two moves ahead, I thought it would give the amateur player some serious problems,” Kasparov politely said about Turochamp after the game.
Alan Turing and David Champernowne’s computing chess engine program laid the foundation for today’s powerfully-advanced chess programs, which calculate thousands of chess move combinations in a fraction of a second.
Against humans, Mittens reportedly won 99% of the chess games played and has been acknowledged as an example of artificial intelligence’s future technological singularity.
Unfortunately, the website Mittens played on recently went through a monthly bot-replacement cycle.
Mittens was one of the bots removed and replaced with one called ChessGPT.
The Mittens Twitter account @MittensChess posted this message: “This is only the beginning. For now, goodbye.”
Several new chess-playing bots, computer programs, and online human competitors are ready to take on your best chess game at https://www.chess.com/home.
It’s a good thing Mittens is currently away from active competition because it would have faced a considerable challenge from this wily veteran human chess player.
An archived link for Mittens, the chess-playing bot, can be seen at chess.com/member/mittens_cat.
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| Original Mittens -- an AI paw-playing chess kitten as archived on Chess dot com |
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| AI created Mittens by the AI art image program from Midjourney |