With the support of an ACM History Fellowship Bernard Geoghegan, a duel-degree doctoral candidate in Screen Cultures (Northwestern University, USA) and medienwissenschaft (Bahaus University, Germany), will prepare the detailed historical account of the ACM Chess Champions. The problem of designing a machine to play chess has fascinated scientists, philosophers, artists and engineers since the 18th century. However, it was not until the initiation of the ACM Chess Championships that chess playing machines became a topic of concerted scientific inquiry and experimentation. Since the first competition, organized by Dr. Monty Newborn and held in New York in 1970, the Chess Competitions have provided an annual forum for leading researchers and laboratories to exchange findings while staging dramatic duels among their chess-playing computers. These events consistently attracted attention from the popular press as well, providing an important occasion for the wider public to learn about computing and participate in debates over human-computer interaction. propose to prepare the first historical and archive-based account of the ACM Chess Competitions. With the support of the ACM, Geoghegan will to investigate how the conferences facilitated the emergence of a number of characteristically "scientific" practices around chess playing machines, including experimentation, exhibition, witnessing, the circulation of research and artifacts, and the cultivation of shared references and techniques.