Today many Internet users enjoy the ready availability through a basic web browser and search engine of the capability of being able to play chess online. For quite a few people online chess constitutes an important component of their digital signature. Interest in the technology and services that would allow people to play chess online has been a subject of interest for much of the modern era of Internet technology, from the earlier point at which the widespread availability of general online services had yet to be achieved in regard to consumers in the market for efficient and affordable devices, to the period during the 1990s during which the use of the technology rapidly expanded, with a corresponding rise in the playing of online chess. It has often been remarked upon that in the various stages of the process through which software and hardware developers worked on the development of the concept of connected computer networks, the idea of creating the capability to play chess online was often raised, perhaps in regard to a particularly marked strain of popularity for this game among the kind of people who are also geared by temperament and skill for the tasks involved in working on Internet services. Even before the creation in the real world of the primitive forms of computer technology that would allow for, among other things, online chess, the basic concept of being able to play chess online was raised by people involved in laying the theoretical foundations for the practical work that would later come.
In regards to the question of why online chess holds such apparent appeal for the developers of sophisticated computer technology, it can be speculated in a general manner that perhaps the same qualities that are often exhibited by the accomplished programmer, such as high levels of pre-planning and an affinity for the strategies involved in problem-solving, are also those that can lead to high success when you play chess online or off. Like the basic concepts of computing and Internet capabilities themselves, the intellectual groundwork for online chess came long before the tools for actually implementing such proposals were at all available. The notable instance of this can be found occurring in 1950, through the efforts of the innovative and important electronics engineer and mathematician Claude Shannon, who had previously published a 1948 paper generally accorded credit for being the cornerstone of the field now known as information theory. In his 1950 paper, which he entitled “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess,” he predicted that two basic approaches would be taken in the world of software toward the question of how to enable the capacity to play chess online or against a computer. These two approaches he divided between “A” and “B,” giving his preference to “B.” “Type A” was founded on a “minimax” algorithm that considered every possible move that could be taken, whereas “B,” now indeed the dominant model for online chess, which cut back on the moves considered for each turn.
Tags: Chess Online, online chess