p.4"Shannon's paper was written in 1948 and published in 1950. He
did not describe an actual chess program but he did suggest many useful ideas which are still in use. He realized the necessity
of having a good scoring function (a chess master's most valuable asset is his ability to assess the merit of a position).
He also pointed out that a scoring function... could only be applied in quiescent positions."
A machine should know how to play an opening variation. Some machines played top-notch moves from
an opening 'book' and then promptly played silly moves when the moves contained in the 'book' ran out . This demonstrates
that 'expert level' play was many years distant, if possible at all.
p.31"In my opinion it is at least as important to teach programs the ideas behind the openings as
it is to teach them the openings themselves."
Here Levy comments on the general inability of machines to grasp simple positional concepts and
suggests that a finer degree of understanding of positional concepts is in order.
p.50"[Levy is commenting on a move just played in a game, 9...BxN]
Normal play for a chess program, doubling the opponent's pawns even though it requires giving up bishop for knight. Herein
lies one of the fundamental problems of computer chess - how to teach programs when particular heuristics apply and when they
should be considered less important than others... Most programs seem to believe that the disadvantage of doubled pawns is
greater than the advantage of bishop over knight. In fact this is generally the reverse of the case."
Here we have a case where the machine operators (during a tournament game) type in the
wrong moves and cause a machine to start analyzing and generating moves for the wrong positions. It doesn't really matter,
because the machine in question is lost anyway.
p.56"In this position [Levy is commenting on another game played between computers] the TREEFROG
programmers discovered that their program was not analysing the correct position (possibly a couple of White's most recent
moves had been incorrectly typed on TREEFROG's terminal). Since Black's position has been hopelessly lost for some time the
programmers resigned for their program."
Here Levy is playing a machine and blunders, losing a rook, but can nevertheless trap his opponent's
piece and salvage the game because the machine has no idea that the piece is trapped.
p.66"[Levy comments on how a computer program cannot accurately assess a position in a game he is
playing against a machine where his opponent is up a rook but cannot bring the piece into play] So I am a rook down
but Black's [the computer's] rook is out of play... Without the ability to conceptualize no program will ever play Grandmaster
chess."
