Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
cial purpose Chess hardware, was crushing many top human players and
even tied for first place in a tournament at Long Beach, California, ahead
of ex-World Champion Mikhail Tal. Ken Thompson's work on BELLE
had led the way in special purpose Chess hardware—the Carnegie Mel-
lon group, and in particular Feng-hsiung Hsu who designed their Chess
chip, were Thompson's most successful disciples.
Deep Thought's success at Long Beach prompted Donald Michie to
organise a match between the program and myself, in which Hsu and his
colleagues would have the opportunity to pick up the Omni prize. The
program “trained” by playing a two-game match against World Cham-
pion Garry Kasparov in New York in October 1989, losing both games
convincingly. My own match was played in London in December 1989
and I was very horribly crushed, losing 4-0. I had survived the ten-year
period of the original bet and another 11 years afterwards, but now had
to accept that I had been well and truly eclipsed. Fortunately, Kasparov
himself was ready and enthusiastic to take up the challenge.
Deep Thought had, not surprisingly, won the World Computer Chess
Championship in Edmonton, Alberta, in May 1989. But the real news
being discussed during the Edmonton event was that the development
team had just been hired by IBM, whose financial and technical mus-
cle were to support the programmers' efforts to defeat Garry Kasparov
in a match. It was rumoured that $5 million had been set aside for
the project and that a three-year time frame was the target. The tech-
nical basis for the project was not the sophisticated software written by
very smart programmers, although that also played a crucial role, it was
the special purpose hardware on which the program was run. The Deep
Thought chip was redesigned by Hsu and the new version provided enor-
mous computational power, supplanting up to 40,000 general-purpose
program instructions with hardware that can execute the same tasks 2 to
2.5 million times per second.
It was this combination of ultra-fast hardware and extremely sophis-
ticated software, plus the Chess knowledge given to the programmers by
various human grandmasters, that enabled the IBM system to take on
Kasparov and have a genuine chance of success. Deep Blue, as it was
now known, played its first serious match against Kasparov in Phildel-
phia, in February 1996, and lost 3 1
/
/
2 , after surprisingly winning the
first game of the match. The following year in New York it was a different
story.
2 -2 1
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