The first international computer tournament was held in Stockholm in 1974, where the world's strongest Chess programs competed in the first World Computer Chess Championship. The first title went to the Soviet Union with a program called Kaissa, spurring the West to come back with Chess 4.6 the next year, the start of a 5 year reign by the USA.

Since then we have seen many more such events, including the widely publicised contest in 1997 between the supercomputer Deep Blue and the world's strongest player at the time, Kasparov. Other competitions have appeared with the games Go (Weichi from China), Shogi (Japanese Chess) and Bridge hosting the biggest events.

Recent competitions:

These events are important in many ways. First they provide an opportunity to test your program. These are also good opportunities to meet and discuss ideas with competing teams. These events are often linked to academic conferences, so the evenings become brainstorming sessions for new ideas. Finally, success in these world championships has an important commercial impact: It is much easier to sell a program that is the current World Champion, or in the top few competing programs, than a program that has not performed well. This generally results in most teams putting huge amounts of effort preparing for these events. You can be sure that everyone you face has been burning the midnight oil tuning their program!

Our in-house Shogi program "Shotest", authored by Jeff Rollason, competed for the first time in the 1997 World Computer Shogi Championships in Tokyo (http://www.computer-shogi.org/index_e.html). This is a field completely dominated by Japan, now attracting some 60 competing programs. Shotest made some waves, coming 13th at its first attempt, 10 places higher than any other non-Japanese program. These early competitions were held in Tokyo bay, close to the huge Tokyo Disneyland complex.

The following year really attracted attention as Shotest qualified for the final round of the top 8-programs: the first Western program to do so. When the final round came, the final game between Shotest and IS Shogi would decide who took the title. Since Shotest had already beaten IS Shogi earlier, having a non-Japanese World Champion was a strong possibility! Shotest unfortunately lost, coming 3rd overall, a position it defended the following year. Shotest has competed in all World Championships since, excepting 2003 and 2004, where the creation and consolidation of AI Factory took precedence!

Shotest currently ranks 7th in the world, having successfully always been the strongest Western entry in all championships. It has competed in 8 World Championships, 2 Invitation ISF tournaments (Tokyo) and 3 Olympiads, winning one of the latter. We will continue to compete in the World Championship and expect to enter with a substantially stronger program at the next event.

Below are links to reports on Computer Shogi tournaments which include news on AI Factory's Shotest Shogi:

An account of the 10th World Computer Shogi Championship

Account of 8th World Computer Shogi Championship (and in the original Japanese) - Shotest came third in this competition.

Shotest Vs Nara Shogi (and in the original Japanese)

The Computer Shogi Tournaments - Reports by Reijer Grimbergen

Full accounts of all the 8th to 13th World Computer Shogi Championships (and in the original Japanese)

Dr Mick Reiss's program Go4++ (now simply Go++), has been competing since 1987, where he has a solid track record of always being in the top few ranked programs, having competed in some 25 events in Japan, Korea, China, the USA and Europe. These events are entirely run using Microcomputers in modern times, but in early years Mick's Go program was also used to test experimental hardware, and in one Hamburg tournament ran on a 32 processor transputer.

Go++ is now ranked the overall strongest Go program, from the last few tournaments, and iscurrently the top selling Go program in Japan. His arch-rival for many years has not been from Japan, but from China, where the venerable Chen Zhixing, author of Handtalk (now called Goemate) dominated the early tournaments, but who has now dropped below Go++ in the rankings.

Mick's program has featured in many publications, including a long article in New Scientist: See New Scientist vol 174 issue 2338 - 13 April 2002, page 38

Andrew Bracher started work on Oxford Bridge as early as 1980, then with a modest Commodore VIC20. Unlike Go, Shogi and Chess, Bridge is not a game of complete information, which adds another substantial dimension of complexity to solving the game. From a modest start, a solid Bridge Program was developed that now competes in Computer Tournaments. In 1998 his program (Omar Bridge) competed in a tournament with six other Bridge programs and the World Bridge Champion Zia Mahmood. Omar Bridge did not rank above the champion, but led the field jointly with Zia for several rounds and finished joint top among the computer opponents. Oxford Bridge is still being very actively developed.

Chess accounts for the bulk of Computer tournaments and attracts the most substantial effort. The top programs now play at a level that would allow them to reasonably compete in the human Grandmaster events, even when running on modest microcomputer hardware. One of our Chess engines is based on the Chess System Tal program, authored by Chris Whittington. This exceptional program is renowned for its strong human style, resembling that of the former World Champion Mikhail Tal. His great strength was in the creation of positions with great tactical complexities, as the World Champion Petrosian remarked "I know what to do in the positions that Tal creates, but I do not know how to create them". Chess Tal plays in this attacking style and has been shown to perform well in human contests. In Computer Chess it came 10th among an exceptionally strong field of 34 programs at the 15th World Computer Championships in Paris 1997. The Chess Tal engine is not currently being developed, but already plays at an exceptionally high level, beyond the vast majority of human players.