Beating Humans at their own Game

Abstract: Creating an artificial intelligence that can play games such as chess against humans has become a popular subject of research with it’s roots in the 1950’s. Over the following 70 years, strategies and algorithms evolved to the point where the average computer using the state of the art chess AI easily beats the best humans players. This was not always the case, as it took until 1997 for the then current reigning world champion Garry Kasparov to lose to the chess engine Deep Blue. In this thesis a survey over the different techniques developed and refined over time in chess AI along with their strengths and weaknesses are presented. Finally, an implementation of a chess engine built for the purpose of this thesis project will be presented.