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John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 – October 24, 2011) was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. McCarthy was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence. He coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized time-sharing, invented garbage collection, and was very influential in the early development of AI.

McCarthy spent most of his career at Stanford University. He received many accolades and honors, such as the 1971 Turing Award for his contributions to the topic of AI, the United States National Medal of Science, and the Kyoto Prize.

Chess boxing, or chessboxing, is a hybrid that combines two traditional pastimes: chess, a cerebral board game, and boxing, a physical sport. The competitors fight in alternating rounds of chess and boxing. Chessboxing was invented by French comic book artist Enki Bilal and adapted by Dutch performance artist Iepe Rubingh as an art performance and has subsequently grown into a competitive sport. Chessboxing is particularly popular in Germany, the United Kingdom, India, and Russia.

Kriegspiel is a chess variant invented by Henry Michael Temple in 1899 and based upon the original Kriegsspiel (German for war game) developed by Georg von Reiswitz in 1812. In this game each player can see their own pieces, but not those of their opponent. For this reason, it is necessary to have a third person (or computer) act as an umpire, with full information about the progress of the game. When it is a player's turn he or she will attempt a move, which the umpire will declare to be 'legal' or 'illegal'. If the move is illegal, the player tries again; if it is legal, that move stands. Each player is given information about checks and captures. They may also ask the umpire if there are any legal captures with a pawn. Since the position of the opponent's pieces is unknown, Kriegspiel is a game of imperfect information. The game is sometimes referred to as blind chess.

Kasparov versus the World was a game of chess played in 1999 over the Internet. Conducting the white pieces, Garry Kasparov faced the rest of the world in consultation, with the World Team moves to be decided by plurality vote. Over 50,000 people from more than 75 countries participated in the game.

The host and promoter of the match was the MSN Gaming Zone, with sponsorship from First USA bank. After 62 moves played over four months, Kasparov won the game. Contrary to expectations, the game produced a mixture of deep tactical and strategic ideas, and although Kasparov won, he admitted that he had never expended as much effort on any other game in his life. He later said, "It is the greatest game in the history of chess. The sheer number of ideas, the complexity, and the contribution it has made to chess make it the most important game ever played."

Los Alamos chess (or anti-clerical chess) is a chess variant played on a 6×6 board without bishops. This was the first chess-like game played by a computer program. This program was written at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory by Paul Stein and Mark Wells for the MANIAC I computer in 1956. The reduction of the board size and the number of pieces from standard chess was due to the very limited capacity of computers at the time.

The program was very simple, containing only about 600 instructions. It was mostly a minimax tree search and could look four plies ahead. For scoring the board at the end of the four-ply lookahead, it estimates a score for material and a score for mobility, then adds them up. Pseudocode for the chess program is described in Figure 11.4 of Newell, 2019. In 1958, a revised version was written for MANIAC II for full 8×8 chess, though its pseudocode was never published. There is a record of a single game by it, circa November 1958 (Table 11.2 of Newell, 2019).

Taikyoku shōgi (Japanese: 大局将棋) lit. "ultimate chess" is the largest known variant of shogi (Japanese chess). The game was created around the mid-16th century (presumably by priests) and is based on earlier large board shogi games. Before the rediscovery of taikyoku shogi in 1997, tai shogi was believed to be the largest playable chess variant ever. It has not been shown that taikyoku shogi was ever widely played. There are only two sets of restored taikyoku shogi pieces and one of them is held at Osaka University of Commerce. One game may be played over several long sessions and require each player to make over a thousand moves.

Because the game was found only recently after centuries of obscurity, it is difficult to say exactly what all the rules were. Several documents describing the game have been found; however, there are differences between them. Many of the pieces appear in other shogi variants but their moves may be different. The board, and likewise the pieces, were made much smaller, making archeological finds difficult to decipher. Research into this game continues for historical and cultural reasons, but also to satisfy the curious and those who wish to play what could be the most challenging chess-like game ever made. More research must be done however. This article focuses on one likely set of rules that can make the game playable in modern times but is by no means canon. These rules may change as more discoveries are made and secrets of the game unlocked.

Further, because of the terse and often incomplete wording of the historical sources for the large shogi variants, except for chu shogi and to a lesser extent dai shogi (which were at some points of time the most prestigious forms of shogi being played), the historical rules of taikyoku shogi are not clear. Different sources often differ significantly in the moves attributed to the pieces, and the degree of contradiction (summarised below with the listing of most known alternative moves) is such that it is likely impossible to reconstruct the "true historical rules" with any degree of certainty, if there ever was such a thing. It is not clear if the game was ever played much historically, as there is no record of any sets having been made.

The Immortal Game was a chess game played by Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky on 21 June 1851 in London, during a break of the first international tournament. The bold sacrifices made by Anderssen to secure victory have made it one of the most famous chess games of all time. Anderssen gave up both rooks and a bishop, then his queen, checkmating his opponent with his three remaining minor pieces. In 1996, Bill Hartston called the game an achievement "perhaps unparalleled in chess literature".

Battle Chess is a computer game version of chess in which the chess pieces come to life and battle one another when capturing. It was originally developed and released by Interplay Entertainment for the Amiga in 1988 and subsequently on many other systems, including 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, Acorn Archimedes, Amiga CD32, Amiga CDTV, Apple IIGS, Apple IIe, Atari ST, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, FM Towns, NES, Mac OS, NEC PC-9801, X68000 and Microsoft Windows. In 1991, Battle Chess Enhanced was released by Interplay for the PC, featuring improved VGA graphics and a symphonic musical score that played from the CD-ROM.

Battle Chess was critically acclaimed and commercially successful, resulting in two official follow-ups as well as several inspired games. Its remake, Battle Chess: Game of Kings, was released on Steam on December 11, 2015.

El Ajedrecista (English: The Chess Player) is an automaton built in 1912 by Leonardo Torres y Quevedo, one of the first autonomous machines capable of playing chess. As opposed to the human-operated The Turk and Ajeeb, El Ajedrecista was a true automaton built to play chess without human guidance. It played an endgame with three chess pieces, automatically moving a white king and a rook to checkmate the black king moved by a human opponent.

The device could be considered the first computer game in history. It created great excitement when it made its debut, at the University of Paris in 1914. It was first widely mentioned in Scientific American as "Torres and His Remarkable Automatic Devices" on November 6, 1915.

The automaton does not deliver checkmate in the minimum number of moves, nor always within the 50 moves allotted by the fifty-move rule, because of the simple algorithm that calculates the moves. It did, however, checkmate the opponent every time. If an illegal move was made by the opposite player, the automaton would signal it by turning on a light. If the opposing player made three illegal moves, the automaton would stop playing.

Zugzwang (German for "compulsion to move", pronounced [ˈtsuːktsvaŋ]) is a situation found in chess and other turn-based games wherein one player is put at a disadvantage because they must make a move when they would prefer to pass and not move. The fact that the player is compelled to move means that their position will become significantly weaker. A player is said to be "in zugzwang" when any possible move will worsen their position.

Although the term is used less precisely in games such as chess, it is used specifically in combinatorial game theory to denote a move that directly changes the outcome of the game from a win to a loss. Putting the opponent in zugzwang is a common way to help the superior side win a game, and in some cases it is necessary in order to make the win possible.

The term zugzwang was used in German chess literature in 1858 or earlier, and the first known use of the term in English was by World Champion Emanuel Lasker in 1905. The concept of zugzwang was known to chess players many centuries before the term was coined, appearing in an endgame study published in 1604 by Alessandro Salvio, one of the first writers on the game, and in shatranj studies dating back to the early 9th century, over 1000 years before the first known use of the term.

Positions with zugzwang occur fairly often in chess endgames, especially in king and pawn endgames. According to John Nunn, positions of reciprocal zugzwang are surprisingly important in the analysis of endgames.