Kaissa (Russian:Каисса) was achess program developed in theSoviet Union in the 1960s. It was named so afterCaissa, the goddess of chess. Kaissa became the firstworld computer chess champion in 1974 inStockholm.
By 1967, a computer program byGeorgy Adelson-Velsky,Vladimir Arlazarov, Alexander Bitman and Anatoly Uskov on the M-2 computer[1] inAlexander Kronrod’s laboratory at theInstitute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics had defeatedKotok-McCarthy running on theIBM 7090 atStanford University. By 1971,Mikhail Donskoy joined with Arlazarov and Uskov to program its successor on anICLSystem 4/70 at the Institute of Control Sciences.[2][3] In 1972 the program played acorrespondence match against readers of popular Russian newspaper,Komsomolskaya Pravda. The readers won, 1½-½. It was the journalists ofKomsomolskaya Pravda who gave the program its name,Kaissa.
Kaissa became the firstworld computer chess champion in 1974 inStockholm. The program won all four games and finished first ahead of programs "Chess 4", "Chaos" and "Ribbit", which got 3 points.[4] After the championship, Kaissa and Chess 4 played a game, which ended in adraw. The success of Kaissa can be explained by the many innovations it introduced. It was the first program to usebitboards. Kaissa contained an opening book with 10,000 moves[5] and used a novelalgorithm for movepruning. Also it could search during the opponent's move, usednull-move heuristic and had sophisticated algorithms for time management. All this is common in moderncomputer chess programs, but was new at that time.
The last time when Kaissa participated inWCCC was its third championship, 1980 inLinz, where it finished tied for sixth to eleventh place in a field of eighteen competitors.[6] The development of Kaissa was stopped after that due to a decision by Soviet government that the programmer's time was better spent working on practical projects rather than chess.[5]
AnIBM PC version of Kaissa was developed in 1990. It took fourth place in the2nd Computer Olympiad in London in 1990.[7][8]
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The second computer chess championship in 1977 inToronto, featured an unusual game by Kaissa. In the diagram at right, Kaissa (black) was well ahead of its opponent, DUCHESS fromDuke University. Kaissa was well ahead on the chess clock, but it gave away arook with 34...Re8 and lost afterwards.[9] After programmers entered the obvious move 34...Kg7 into the program, Kaissa explained why it did not play it: 34...Kg7 35. Qf8+!! Kxf8 36. Bh6+ Bg7 37. Rc8+ and Whitecheckmates in two moves. This caused a sensation and was published in many chess magazines of that time. None of the human spectators present saw this nicequeen sacrifice. Despite this, Kaissa finished the tournament tied for second place with DUCHESS, behindChess 4.6.