First Tests

Continuing the quest to create a chess-playing machine, Dr. Dietrich Prinz in England wrote the first limited chess program in 1951. The computer was not powerful enough to play a full game but could find the best move if it was only two moves away from checkmate, known as the "mate-in-two" problem.

In the United States, Alex Bernstein, an experienced chess player and a programmer at IBM, wrote a program in 1958 that could play a full chess game, although it could be defeated by novice players.