No, no, no! The conductors in a computer from that era were most likely actual wires made from either Aluminum or Copper.

Nowadays the conductors are embedded in the microprocessor. They are called interconnects, and they are made from Copper. The vias from metal 1 are typically Tungsten (Wolfram).

Not Iron!

It's NOT easy and it IS time consuming but I made a steampunk 1 kilobyte iron memory stick for a friend.

It took me two and a half years and cost £17,700 but it was worth it! He's got one and a half great fonts on it.>

Maybe so, but you are living in the 21st century. Bronsteins' opponent was made from primitive Soviet technology of the early 1960s.

Back then, a Soviet fighter pilot defected to Japan in his Kirolyi 117 jet fighter.

Strange as it may seem, Botvinnik was very proper and would not have condoned any form of cheating.

That does not sound plausible. In the early 1960s computers were scarce, slow, expensive, and in demand. So being able to free two of the more powerful computers to play a 10-game chess match against each other was unlikely.

Burger's <The Chess of Bobby Fischer> said, without elaboration, that the Soviet algorithm was running on a slower machine.

Shannon's type-A strategy was a brute force-like approach; it looks at all the legal moves from the starting position and subsequent candidate positions until a predetermined search depth is reached, and it then selects the move that leads to the best position in the minimax sense. It is therefore not capable of searching very deeply because the number of candidate positions increases exponentially as the depth of the search tree increases. Thus, with the computers available in the late 1960s, a 3-ply deep search would take about 16 minutes. See https://chessprogramming.wikispaces....

In contrast, Shannon's type-B strategy only looks at a subset of plausible moves according to its search tree pruning heuristics. In that sense it's much more like modern chess programs and it can reach much deeper search depths in the same amount of time. See https://chessprogramming.wikispaces....

While the type-B strategy seems much more effective, a lot depends on the implementation. In the late 1960s the search tree pruning heuristics were not very advanced, causing the Stanford program (it doesn't seem to have had a name and it was sometimes called the Kotov/McCarthy program) to discard some promising moves. According to https://chessprogramming.wikispaces... it considered 4 moves on the first ply, 3 moves on the second ply, 2 moves on the third and fourth plies, and only one move on plies 5 – 8. Imagine the quality of the current Stockfish's play if it was limited to an 8-ply search! And its weak plausible move generator (no description of it provided) apparently caused it to discard many promising moves, leading Botvinnik to comment that "the rule for rejecting moves was so constituted that the machine threw out the baby with the bath water."

In contrast the ITEP program had a fixed ply search tree depth, using a 3-ply limit in games 1 and 2 of the match (which ended in draws) and a 5-ply depth in games 3 and 4 (both of which ended up as wins for ITEP). So in this case the brute-force approach seemed to prevail. It also seems that ITEP had a better evaluation function, particularly when it came to evaluating spatial advantages.

The ITEP program also took advantage of the fact that there was effectively no time control, each program could take as long as it needed to make its move. So, while the Stanford program apparently made each of its moves within 20 minutes, ITEP could sometimes take hours to make its move. This negated the main disadvantage of the type-A strategy, the exponentially increasing time required per move as the search depth increases.

In contrast, the IBM 7090 where the Stanford program ran had a 36-bit word length with a maximum capacity of 32,768 words (I'm not sure how large the memory was in the 7090 used in the match), and probably required only about 6 usecs to execute an average instruction (my estimate, assuming an average instruction was the equivalent of an average of 3 additions and 1 multiplication) (http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/e...)

Thank you!

<A curious fact is that there seems to be some difference in what articles report as the match result. Some report that the score was +2=2-0 in favor of ITEP and some report the score as +3=1-0 in favor of ITEP. Since the first link I provided gives the game scores, I'll go with the +2=2-0 match result.>

<Game 1: ITEP vs. Kotok-McCarthy>

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The comment about this position in the book said "White is ahead one Pawn and may have a slight advantage. In the present position it can play 38...Nd2."

<Game 2: Kotok-McCarthy vs. ITEP>

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The comment about this position in the book said "Black should be able to force White to give up material in order to prevent the Rook's pawn from queening."

Just for fun, I had Stockfish 7 analyze the ending positions of both games and this is what it came up with:

<Game 1>: [+2.03], d=32 after 38.Nd2 Qd8 39.Ra1 Qb6 40.Kg2 Qb4 41.Ra4 Qb5 42.Rc4 Bd1 43.Rc1 Bh5 44.Rc5 Qa6 45.Nc4 Rb5 46.d5 Rxc5 47.Qxc5 cxd5 48.Qxd5 Qc8 49.Ne3 Qe8 50.e5 Kh8 51.Kg3 h6 52.gxh6 gxh6 53.Qxa5 Qb8 54.b4 f6 55.Kf2 fxe5 56.Nc4 e4 57.Qe5+ Qxe5 58.Nxe5 Kg7 59.Ke3

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This is clearly a win for White since Black's Pe4 will fall, leaving White 2 pawns up.

<Game 2> [-4.85], d=35 after 40... a3 41.Rb1 Nxc3 42.Ra1 a2 43.Rc2 Ra3 44.f3 h5 45.Kf2 Kg6 46.g4 hxg4 47.fxg4 Ne4+ 48.Kg1 Bd5 49.Rb2 Ra4 50.Rc2 Kg7 51.Kh2 Kf7 52.Re2 Ke7 53.Kh1 Kd7 54.Kg1 Kd6 55.Kh2 Nc3 56.Re3 Nb5 57.Re2 Nxd4 58.Rd2 Nb5 59.Kg1 Ke5 60.Kf1 Nd6 61.Re2+ Ne4 62.Ke1

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This is an even clearer win for Black, with B+N+P vs. R, and a far advanced passed pawn. But Stockfish didn't seem to know how to drive the point home.

So it looks like both drawn games could have also been won by ITEP, since it achieved a superior position for both of them. Of course, achieving a superior or even winning position in a game was no guarantee that the win could be found, given the relatively weak play of both programs (I'm not sure that I can get myself to call them "engines"). Heck, even Stockfish 7 didn't seem to know how to proceed to achieve the win for Black in Game 2.

But, of the 2 games, it is more likely that Game 2 was the one adjudicated a win for Black in spite of the drawn result. Still, the drawn result is the official one, so I still think that the correct result for the match should be +2=2-0 in favor of ITEP.