The beginning of computer chess occured in 1770, when the diplomat and inventor, Wolfgang von Kempelen, built a chess-playing machine called The Turk and presented it to the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria-Hungary. The Turk traveled to public fairs and royal courts for eighty-five years and played such well known figures as Charles Babbage, Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. However, it was an elaborate hoax.The real history of computer chess begins in the 1950s when programs could only play at a basic level.  Scientists developed the fundamental techniques for evaluating chess positions and for searching possible moves and counter-moves; these techniques would be employed later. By the end of the 1960s, computer chess programs could only occasionally beat amateur chess players. Alan Turing in England and Claude Shannon in the United States later developed two methods of computer calculation, one in which computers would evaluate all possible positions through a search tree and one in which a computer program would only consider certain positions based on positional knowledge of chess masters.  Dr. Dietrich Prinz in England wrote the first limited chess program in 1951 after Turing and Shannon's experiments. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon at Carnegie Mellon University and Cliff Shaw at the Rand Corporation developed some of the fundamental programming ideas behind all computer chess programs, such as Alpha-Beta pruning and the minimax alogrithm. The minimax algorithm involved calcualting the best move and the opponent's worst move in turn, while the alpha-beta pruning technique allowed the computer to ignore bad lines that were irrelevant. Most contemporary computer programs have implemented these techniques.  As chess programs evolved, more positional knowledge was implemented. Richard Greenblatt, an MIT programmer and successful chess player added fifty heuristics (rules of thumb) that captured his in-depth knowledge of chess. His MacHack VI program for the DEC PDP-6 computer played at the level of a good high-school player. Deep Thought, a predecessor of Deep Blue, the program that defeated former world champion Garry Kasparov, won the Fredkin Intermediate Prize in 1989 for the first system to play at the Grandmaster level (above 2400). Chess is so difficult to solve that many estimate the number of possible positions as 10 to the 125 power, which is more than the known amount of atoms in the universe. While chess computers can defeat a human world champion, they still have not solved chess and probably will not in the immediate future. Garry Kasparov was the first world champion to be defeated by Deep Blue, a computer devised and dismantled by IBM. Deep Blue evaluated 200 million positions per second. The first time Kasparov played Deep Blue, he won, but the rematch led to his defeat (even though he won the first game in spectacular style). Since then, Deep Fritz (a Chessbase program operating on normal multi-core computer) trounced world champion Vladimir Kramnik, delivering mate in one to a befuddled world champion.

While chess programs have consistently grown stronger, it has been difficult for programmers to develop a program that can teach how to play grandmaster chess to a human player.