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 80´s 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 Storm´81 (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 isn´t always easy.