AJuly 29 1966
The Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Friday, July 29, 1966
Coals To Newcastle: Chess 'Brain' Takes On Reds
George W. Baylor
Tech instructor to “checkmate” Russians.
World's Best Players To Learn From Tech Instructor's Studies By Art Glickman
Telling the Russians how to play chess is like telling Arnold Palmer how to play golf.
But George W. Baylor, a young psychology instructor at Carnegie Institute of Technology, will give it the old college try next week when he presents a paper at the 18th International Congress of Psychology in Moscow
'They Can Learn'
Although he feels the Russians “are the best chess players in the world,” he thinks they can still learn something from a computer program he developed analyzing “what makes a good chess player.”
By analyzing chess moves, according to Mr. Taylor, psychologists can begin to understand the whole realm of human problem-solving behavior.
This could lead to more simplified ways of doing things in other fields, such as algebra, he said.
The instructor, an avid chess player in his youth, chose the chess computer program fro his masters thesis at Tech. He is currently studying for his doctorate.
The computer he worked with did not play complete games, but searched for checkmating combinations.
Checkmating is the checking of an opponent's king so that escape from capture of the attacking piece is impossible.
Choose Rules
By Following a select set of these rules instead of trying to sift through the hundred of thousands of possible moves, the computer can play intelligent chess.
Chess-playing computers now in existence cannot store all the possible moves in their memories
For this reason Mr. Baylor said, a computer competing in a Pittsburgh chess tournament would probably come out in the middle of the field. But eventually, he added, “we think we can make a world expert.”
Similar computers can be used to expand the power of human thinking in more academic areas than chess.
For example, computers can take note of how top students go about solving algebra problems. Their findings could be used to revise textbooks.
Many algebra textbooks, Mr. Baylor said, give poor instructions as to how to solve problems.
