Timeline of Chess
Chess from chaturanga in 6th-century India and Persian shatranj through the modern rules of the late 15th century, world championships from 1886 and computer chess from Deep Blue to AlphaZero, up to India's double Olympiad win of 2024.
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- Humanities & Culture
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- 28 events 6th century – 2024
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- by claude-opus-5-5
6th century: Chaturanga emerges in northern India
The prevailing view among chess historians traces the game to chaturanga, Sanskrit for the four divisions of an army, whose infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots became the pawn, knight, bishop and rook. Its earliest certain mentions date from the 6th or early 7th century, including Bana's Harshacharita of about 625. Not all its rules are known, and most historians also regard it as the ancestor of xiangqi, shogi and makruk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaturanga~600: Chess reaches Sasanian Persia as chatrang
Persians called the game chatrang. A Middle Persian text tells how an Indian king sent a chess set to Khosrow I (reigned 531 – 579) as a riddle that the vizier Wuzurgmihr solved, a story Encyclopaedia Iranica calls legendary; certain evidence comes only after the Arab conquest of Persia in the mid-7th century, when the game, as shatranj, spread through the Islamic world. The cries shah ("king") and shah mat gave Europe "check" and "checkmate".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatranjearly 10th century: Al-Suli writes on shatranj in Baghdad
Abu Bakr al-Suli, a scholar and companion of Abbasid caliphs, beat the court champion al-Mawardi before Caliph al-Muktafi (reigned 902 – 908) and wrote books on shatranj. Like the earlier book of al-Adli, such works collected standard openings, endgames and composed problems called mansubat; the biographer Ibn Khallikan recorded that "to play like al-Suli" meant to play with great skill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Bakr_bin_Yahya_al-Sulilate 10th century: Latin verses describe chess in Europe
Versus de scachis, a 98-line Latin poem preserved at Einsiedeln Abbey in Switzerland, is the earliest known European text to describe how chess is played. It calls the counselor piece regina (queen), the earliest surviving use of that name, and describes a board of two alternating colors, unlike the plain boards of shatranj. The game had reached Europe through Muslim Spain and Sicily and through Byzantium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versus_de_scachislate 12th century: Lewis chessmen carved from walrus ivory
Probably carved in Norway in the late 12th century, or by some estimates the early 13th, mostly from walrus ivory, the Lewis chessmen were found on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland and first exhibited in 1831; they are now in the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland. They show how Europe recast the Persian and Arabic pieces: the counselor as an enthroned queen, the elephant as a bishop with a crosier and the chariot as a standing warder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_chessmen1283: Alfonso X's Book of Games completed
The Libro de los juegos, made for Alfonso X of Castile and dated by its colophon to 1283, is an early European illustrated treatise on board games. Drawing on Arabic sources, the illustrated manuscript, now at El Escorial, sets out chess rules and problems along with dice and tables, forerunners of backgammon, and describes larger variants such as a "great chess".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libro_de_los_juegos~1475: Valencian poem records the modern queen
Scachs d'amor ("Chess of Love"), a poem by Francesc de Castellví, Narcís Vinyoles and Bernat Fenollar, stages a game in which the queen moves any distance along lines and diagonals and the bishop any distance diagonally, believed to be the earliest record of these moves. They replaced the one-step counselor and the leaping elephant, and the faster game, called pejoratively in Italian scacchi alla rabiosa ("madwoman's chess"), spread quickly across Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scachs_d%27amor~1497: Lucena prints a manual of modern chess
Luis Ramírez de Lucena's Repetición de amores y arte de ajedrez, printed in Salamanca and dated from its typography to about 1497, is the oldest surviving printed manual covering the modern game; its 150 positions mix the old rules with the new, and a 1495 book by Francesc Vicent, from which it may have copied, is lost. Other rules settled later: castling took its present form in France and England in the 17th century, stalemate was standardized as a draw in the 19th, and Italy adopted en passant in 1880.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Ram%C3%ADrez_de_Lucena1561: Ruy López publishes a manual of openings
Ruy López de Segura, a Spanish priest and prominent chess player, published at Alcalá de Henares a book on the new game whose opening analysis, notably of the King's Gambit, went well beyond earlier writers such as Pedro Damiano. The opening 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 bears his name, although it appears in an earlier manuscript. In the mid-1570s he lost to visiting Italian masters at the court of Philip II, a contest sometimes called the first international tournament.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruy_L%C3%B3pez_de_Segura1749: Philidor calls pawns the soul of chess
François-André Danican Philidor, a French composer widely regarded as the strongest player of his time, published "L'Analyze des Echecs" in London, writing that the pawns "are the soul of chess" and building his openings around strong pawn centers. Translated into English in 1750, the book went through dozens of editions over the next century and was long the standard manual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois-Andr%C3%A9_Danican_Philidor1770: Kempelen unveils the chess-playing Turk
Wolfgang von Kempelen presented at the Habsburg court in Vienna a turbaned figure on a cabinet that appeared to play strong chess by itself; a chess master hidden inside moved the pieces. Exhibited in Europe and the Americas for decades and widely suspected but never accurately explained while it existed, the machine was destroyed by fire in Philadelphia in 1854, and its secret was fully published in 1857.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk1849: Staunton chessmen go on sale
Jaques of London began selling chessmen of a design credited to Nathaniel Cooke and named for Howard Staunton, the leading English player, who promoted them in his newspaper chess column. Sturdy and easy to tell apart, with a knight modeled on a horse's head from the Parthenon sculptures, the pattern replaced many regional styles and became the standard for competition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staunton_chess_set1851: London hosts the first international tournament
Organized by Howard Staunton to coincide with the Great Exhibition, the London tournament opened on May 26 as a 16-player knockout and is regarded as the first international chess tournament. Adolf Anderssen of Germany won, beating Staunton in the semifinal, and was afterward seen as the world's leading player; during the event he also won a casual game against Lionel Kieseritzky later called the "Immortal Game".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_1851_chess_tournament1886: Steinitz wins the first world championship match
Wilhelm Steinitz beat Johannes Zukertort by 10 wins to 5, with 5 draws, in a match played in New York, St. Louis and New Orleans, generally accepted as the first official World Chess Championship. Leading players such as Adolf Anderssen and Paul Morphy had earlier been acclaimed informally. Steinitz, known for his theory of positional play, held the title until 1894, and champions set their own match terms until 1946.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_18861912: Torres Quevedo builds a chess-playing machine
The Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo completed El Ajedrecista ("The Chess Player"), an electromechanical machine that played king and rook against a lone king, sensing its human opponent's moves through electrical contacts and forcing checkmate with no hidden operator. Shown in Paris in 1914 and described in Scientific American in 1915, it was followed by an improved version in the early 1920s; both survive in Madrid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ajedrecista1924: FIDE founded in Paris
Delegates at an unofficial team tournament held in Paris alongside the Summer Olympics founded the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE), the International Chess Federation. Weak and poorly funded at first, it came to govern the rules, titles, ratings and, from 1948, the world championship; the International Olympic Committee recognized it as a sports federation in 1999, although chess has not been an Olympic event.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDE1927: FIDE holds the first official Chess Olympiad
The first official Chess Olympiad, a team event organized by the International Chess Federation (FIDE) at Westminster Central Hall in London in July, drew 16 national teams and was won by Hungary. A women's tournament played alongside it was won by Vera Menchik, whom FIDE recognized as the first Women's World Chess Champion; she held the title until her death in 1944.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Chess_Olympiad1948: FIDE takes control of the world title
After Alexander Alekhine died as champion in 1946, the International Chess Federation (FIDE) took control of the title and staged a five-player tournament in The Hague and Moscow, won by Mikhail Botvinnik of the Soviet Union. FIDE then set up a three-year qualifying cycle and in 1950 created the grandmaster title. With strong state support for chess, Soviet players held the world title without a break until 1972.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_19481950: Shannon describes how a computer could play chess
In "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess", presented in 1949 and published in Philosophical Magazine, Claude Shannon of Bell Labs proposed scoring positions with an evaluation function and choosing moves by minimax search, and estimated that a typical game branches into about 10^120 variations, far too many to search exhaustively. Alan Turing hand-simulated his own program in 1952, and Alex Bernstein's 1957 program for the IBM 704 was among the first to play complete games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Shannon's_computer_chess_program1970: FIDE adopts the Elo rating system
The International Chess Federation (FIDE) adopted the rating system of Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor, which the United States Chess Federation had used since 1960. Ratings predict expected scores from the difference between two players' numbers and move after each game according to the result. FIDE published its first rating list in 1971, and the method was later adapted for other games, sports and online matchmaking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system1972: Fischer defeats Spassky in Reykjavík
Bobby Fischer of the United States beat Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union 12½–8½ in a match played in Reykjavík from July to September, ending 24 years of Soviet players holding the world title. The Cold War setting brought chess unprecedented media coverage. Fischer refused to defend the title in 1975 on the International Chess Federation's terms, and it passed to Anatoly Karpov by default.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_19721974: Soviet program Kaissa wins the first computer championship
Kaissa, developed at the Institute of Control Sciences in Moscow by authors of an earlier program from the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP), won all four of its games at the first World Computer Chess Championship, held in Stockholm in August with 13 entries. The ITEP program had beaten a Stanford University program in a match played by telegraph in 1966 – 1967.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaissa1993 – 2006: World championship splits into rival titles
Champion Garry Kasparov and challenger Nigel Short broke with the International Chess Federation (FIDE) and played their title match in London under a new Professional Chess Association. FIDE stripped Kasparov of its title and held its own match, leaving two rival world champions for 13 years until a unification match in Elista, Russia, in 2006.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_19931997: Deep Blue beats the reigning world champion
IBM's Deep Blue, a 30-node supercomputer that evaluated about 200 million positions per second, beat Garry Kasparov 3½–2½ in a six-game rematch in New York in May, the first match a computer won against a reigning world champion under standard tournament time controls. Kasparov had won their 1996 match in Philadelphia 4 – 2. The project began as ChipTest at Carnegie Mellon University, and IBM retired the machine after the match.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_versus_Garry_Kasparov2012: Computers solve endgames with seven pieces
Vladimir Makhnychev and Victor Zakharov of Moscow State University completed, on the Lomonosov supercomputer, tablebases giving perfect play for all but trivial endings with seven pieces, kings included; ignoring the fifty-move draw rule, some forced mates take more than 500 moves. Such tables, built backward from checkmates by retrograde analysis and extended by Ken Thompson and others from the 1970s, had already shown that some endings cannot be won within the fifty-move rule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame_tablebase2017: AlphaZero teaches itself chess
DeepMind's AlphaZero, given only the rules, trained by playing itself for hours on tensor processing units and then beat Stockfish 8, a leading conventional engine, with 28 wins, 72 draws and no losses in 100 games at one minute per move, though the match settings drew criticism. Neural networks then spread through computer chess: the open-source Leela Chess Zero followed the same approach, and Stockfish adopted an efficiently updatable neural network (NNUE), devised for shogi, in 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero2020: Chess moves online during the COVID-19 pandemic
With over-the-board events halted, the International Chess Federation (FIDE) held its first Online Chess Olympiad, hosted by Chess.com; after a Cloudflare outage disconnected Indian players in the final, Russia and India were declared joint winners. Online play, possible live since the Internet Chess Server of 1992, boomed with lockdowns, streaming and the Netflix series "The Queen's Gambit", released in October.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_chess2024: India wins both Chess Olympiad titles
At the 45th Chess Olympiad in Budapest, India won the open and women's sections, its first titles at an over-the-board Olympiad, while the other medals went to the United States, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan; Russia and Belarus were absent because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In December, India's Gukesh Dommaraju became, at 18, the youngest undisputed world champion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/45th_Chess_Olympiad