Los Alamos chess

This was the first chess-like game played by a computer program.

This program was written at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory by Paul Stein and Mark Wells for the MANIAC I computer[2] in 1956.

The reduction of the board size and the number of pieces from standard chess was due to the very limited capacity of computers at the time.

It was mostly a minimax tree search and could look four plies ahead.

Pseudocode for the chess program is described in Figure 11.4 of Newell, 2019.

[3] In 1958, a revised version was written for MANIAC II for full 8×8 chess, though its pseudocode was never published.

There is a record of a single game by it, circa November 1958 (Table 11.2 of Newell, 2019[3]).

All rules are as in chess except: The computer played three games.

The second one was against a strong human player, who played without a queen.