Computer Chess History Pages
These pages contain a large collection of
computer chess tournament results and games
in PGN (Portable Game Notation) format. I
put most of the collection together in the
period of June 2002 to May 2003. A lot of
work has gone into fixing scanning and chess
notation errors and fixing the game headers
in the PGN files to the quality level required
for automated tournament table generation
with the so-called PGN-tool, developed by
myself. The benefit of this
approach is, that the results in the game
notation is guaranteed *) to be consistent
with current and historic publications of
tournament tables. Other sources fail in
this regard, although I am thankful for having used raw data of the
World-Wide Web community as a starting point
for many events. I entered a limited number
of events by hand and scanned some issues
of our Dutch magazine "Computerschaak"
for Aegon man-machine tournament info.
Acknowledgements:
David Levy (ICGA President)
for using his human network and finding sources
of information. For example: Dan and Kathe
Spracklen and Richard Lang.
Peter van Diepen (former CSVN board member,
author of IGM))
for registering moves of the (Open) Dutch Computer Chess Championships for most of
the years 1981-1996 and making them available to me in electronic form and for providing
photocopies of the games of the first 4 rounds of the 1st World Micro CCC (1980).
Ken Thompson (author of Belle)
for providing all games of all 24(!) ACM
North-American CCC and two years of the WMCCC
in some electronic form.
Johanna Hellemons (production assistant of
the ICGA Journal)
for providing electronic text scans of games
of a number of WMCCC years.
Jeff Sonas (ICGA Ratings Officer, @chessmetrics.com)
for providing feedback on my work (hobby!),
which gave a boost to my motivation and productivity
in this area.
He is using the results for rating calculations.
David Tebbutt (PCW)
for providing PCW tournament info.
Jonathan Schaeffer (University of Alberta,
Canada)
for providing info on the Canadian CC Invitational
Championship (1984).
Jan Krabbenbos (webmaster)
for helping with the Aegon man-computer tournament
tables and acting as over-all webmaster for
the computerschaak website leaving more time
for me to produce and publish these history
pages. He is also preparing a
more intuitive navigation mechanism for the
site.
The World-Wide Web community (miscellaneous
websites)
Next Steps:
Setting up a list of programs/authors source+book/program
properties, ancestry, lifespan &
major achievements/ etc. Hundreds of programs
covering roughly 40 years (1963-2003), pffffffff.
Gathering more info on the early 80īs European
championships and recent European national
championships. Did you know there have been
Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian
and even Polish Computer Chess Championship(s)?
Not to mention the strong, but unofficial
German (Paderborn) tournament.
Yours Truly,
Theo van der Storm (author of Stormī81 (1981-1985), secretary
of the CSVN,
organiser of the Open Dutch CC Championships
and Intl. CSVN Tournaments in Leiden)
*) Of course one remains dependent on such
publications. Many publications have incomplete
round information, so the process of fixing
inconsistencies isnīt always easy.