Report on the 1988 Fredkin Masters Open. 105 I remember when I first got a printer, I spent the best part of a day fiddling with the little DIP-switches in- side trying to change the page length. Finally I found a tiny note at the bottom of one page in the middle of a thick manual, which told me that changing the switches had no effect unless you switched the printer off and then on again. I was amazed that anything so completely counter-intuitive would be hidden away like this. Afterwards I tried switching my television off and on when I wanted to change channels, but funnily enough I always got BBC1 ... In conclusion, I believe that computers have now entered the profesional chess scene permanently, and we will see more computer-based aids in the years to come. ChessBase has carved a niche for itself in this market and I would certainly not be without mine now. But I had better sign off now to do some serious chess work; where's that disc with the K+Q v K+R database on it ... ? REPORT ON THE 1988 FREDKIN MASTERS OPEN Murray Campbell, Feng-hsiung Hsu and Gordon Goetsch Carnegie-Mellon University 1. INTRODUCTION At various times in the past decade, the Fredkin Foundation, under the directorship of Dr. Hans Berliner of Carnegie-Mellon University, has sponsored events intended to estimate the strength of the current top chess programs. Along with the support for such tournaments, the Fredkin Foundation is offering a $10,000 prize for the first program to produce a consistent 2500 performance, and a $100,000 prize for the first program to surpass the human World Champion. The prize of $5000 for the first master-level program was awarded to the creators of Belle, Ken Thompson and Joe Condon, in 1983. The last Fredkin event, the 1985 Fredkin Masters Invitational, had clearly established that Hitech was capable of holding its own against well prepared master-level competition. The 1988 Fredkin Masters Open, held over the weekend of May 28-30, 1988, was organized to pit a number of the current top programs against a similar level of competition. Unfortunately only a few programs were able to obtain the necessary machine time. 2. THE PROGRAMS Four programs participated in the tournament: • Hitech: Rated 2376 USCF going into this tournament (and having since surpassed 2400); Hitech has the highest established computer rating. Hitech has special purpose hardware that allows search speeds of up to 150,000 nodes/second, and has a number of programmable feature recognizers for evaluating positions. A number of people have worked on Hitech, including Hans Berliner, Carl Ebeling, Gordon Goetsch, Murray Campbell, Larry Slomer, Andy Palay and Andy Gruss. Hitech was developed at Carnegie-Mellon University. • ChipTest: The current North American computer champion, ChipTest also has special purpose hardware that, running on a Sun 4, can reach about 500,000 nodes/second. ChipTest has a very simple evaluation function, but a rather complex searching algorithm, described in part in Anantharaman et at., (1988). ChipTest was unrated going into the Fredkin tournament. The main authors of ChipTest are Thomas Anantharaman, Feng-hsiung Hsu and Murray Campbell, all at Carnegie-Mellon University.