Computer Analysis of World Chess Champions

Who is the best chess player of all time? Chess players are often interested in this question that has never been answered authoritatively, because it requires comparison between chess players of different eras who never met across the board. In this paper, we attempt such a comparison based on the evaluation with a chess playing program of games played by the world chess champions in their championship matches. We slightly adapted the program Crafty for this purpose. Our analysis also takes into account the differences in players’ styles to account for the fact that calm positional players have in their typical games less chance to commit gross tactical errors than aggressive tactical players. To this end, we designed a method to assess the difficulty of positions. Some of the results of this computer analysis might appear quite surprising. Overall, the results can be nicely interpreted by a chess expert.