SHANNON, Claude Elwood (1916-2001) - photo 1
SHANNON, Claude Elwood (1916-2001) - photo 2

SHANNON, Claude Elwood (1916-2001)

Lot 219
14.12.2022 10:30UTC +00:00
Classic
Starting price
£ 10 000
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 870907
Lot 219 | SHANNON, Claude Elwood (1916-2001)
Estimate value
£ 10 000 – 15 000
SHANNON, Claude Elwood (1916-2001)

‘Programming a Computer for Playing Chess.’ Offprint from: Philosophical Magazine, Vol. 41, Seventh Series, March 1950, pp.256-275. London: Taylor & Francis, 1950.

Extremely rare offprint of the ‘first technical paper on computer chess’ (OOC), inscribed by the author to his sister. On 9 March 1949, Shannon presented this paper at the National Institute for Radio Engineers Convention in New York (although it is dated 8 October 1948). In it Shannon describes how to program a computer to play chess based on position scoring and move selection, proposing basic strategies for restricting the number of possibilities to be considered, e.g. by moving a rook, the right to castle is forfeited. His process for having the computer decide on which move to make was a minimax procedure, based on an evaluation function of a given chess position. Shannon calculated a complexity of 10120 movement variations from the initial position, based on an average of about 103 possibilities for a pair of moves consisting of a move for White followed by a move for Black, and a typical game lasting about 40 such pairs of moves. This number is now known as ‘Shannon's number.’



In the introduction to the paper, Shannon imagined some future practical applications of chess-playing computers might include routing phone calls, translating text, and composing melodies. Noting that many of these machines were in the process of being developed and were of serious economic utility, Shannon points out that these differing applications have one important quality in common: they didn’t operate according to a ‘strict, unalterable computing process.’ Rather, ‘solutions of these problems are not merely right or wrong but have a continuous range of “quality”’. In this way, chess was a valuable test case for the emerging generation of artificial intelligence. Shannon’s ‘ideas have been employed in almost every chess program ever written’ (Levy, Computer Chess Compendium). Worldcat lists one copy only (Münster); no copies of the offprint can be traced in auction records (ABPC/RBH). Tomash & Williams S97; Origins of Cyberspace 882.



Octavo (253 x 171mm). Stapled self-wrappers with the offprint title ‘Programming a computor [sic] for playing chess’ on front cover (a near fine copy, with just the tiniest of chips to upper edge of front wrapper and faint bend to upper corner). Provenance: authorial presentation to: – Catherine ‘Kay’ Shannon (b.1911, sister of the author; ink inscription on upper wrapper).





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