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Deep Blue ^[1]

Deep Blue,
the IBM sponsored successor of the chess entity Deep Thought. The project initially started in 1985 as ChipTest at Carnegie Mellon University by the computer science doctoral students Feng-hsiung Hsu and Thomas Anantharaman. Murray Campbell, former co-developer of HiTech, joined the ChipTest team a few months later. The program was named Deep Thought after the fictional computer of the same name from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Hsu and Campbell joined IBM in 1989, Deep Blue was developed out of this. The name is a play on Deep Thought and Big Blue, IBM's nickname. The declared target was to become the strongest chess entity ever and to beat the human world champion, which eventually happened in 1997 versus Garry Kasparov, winning the $100,000 Fredkin prize, awarded at the AAAI Conference in Providence, Rhode Island.

Description

Deep blue chip ^[2]

1995

Description given in 1995 from the ICGA site ^[3] :

Deep Blue Prototype consists of an IBM RS/6000 workstation with 14 chess search engines as slave processors. Each processor contains a VLSI chip for move generation, as well as additional hardware for search and evaluation. Each Deep Thought 2 processor searches about 500,000 positions per second standalone, or about 400,000 positions per second as a slave processor. (This is about 1/10th of the projected speed of the Deep Blue single-processor currently in fabrication.) The 14-processor Deep Thought 2 typically searches between 3 and 5 million positions per second. When conducting a search, the search tree near the root position is processed on the host workstation, and includes selective search extension algorithms such as singular extensions. The deepest nodes in the search tree are handled by the slave search engines which usually do 4-ply alpha-beta searches.

1997

The 1997 Deep Blue system was based on an IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer, using 30 workstation nodes of PowerPC processors controlling 16 chess chips each, distributed over two Micro Channel boards. A chess chip features of a full-fledged chess machine on its own, along with move generator, a smart move stack, hardware evaluation function, and an alpha-beta hardware search controller. The search occurs in parallel on two levels, one distributed over the IBM RS/6000 SP switching network and the other over the Micro Channel bus inside a workstation node. A master workstation node first starts the software search exclusively, to distribute work to all 30 workstation nodes only at a certain depth (i.e. 4 plies). After generation an appropriate number of childs and grandchilds etc., the software search per node utilize the 16 chess chips to search the final four plies plus quiescence search in hardware. Since each chess chip could search 2 to 2.5 million nodes per second, the system speed reached about one billion nps (480 chips). During the 1997 match, the software search extended the search to about 40 plies along the forcing lines, even though the nonextended search reached only about 12 plies ^[4].

Tournaments & Matches

WCCC 1995

Deep Blue Prototype missed the expected win at the WCCC 1995 by losing the decisive match in round 5 against Fritz after king castling into Fritz's half open g-file.

Kasparov versus Deep Blue

Main article: Kasparov versus Deep Blue 1996

Deep Blue was the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world champion Garry Kasparov under regular time controls. This first win occurred on February 10, 1996, Game 1. However, Kasparov won three games and drew two of the following games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2.

The Rematch

Main article: Kasparov versus Deep Blue 1997

In 1997 Deep Blue won the rematch against Kasparov. He did not recover after the shock by Deep Blues' play in game 2. Kasparov resigned a possibly drawn position, since he missed a deep tricky perpetual check, while he wrongly was confident the machine would not have blundered to allow him to draw. In the final decisive game 6 Kasparov was rather indisposed and blundered in the early opening.

The Deep Blue Team

Feng-hsiung Hsu - The man who started the Deep Blue project while still in college
Murray Campbell - A former chess champion who works with Deep Blue's evaluation function
A. Joseph Hoane - Deep Blue's software engineer
C. J. Tan - Senior manager of the Deep Blue development team
Jerry Brody - The project's support engineer
Joel Benjamin - development team chess consultant, opening book author

Photos

5-0 and 5-4.Campbell Benjamin.1997.L02645333.IBM ARCHIVES.lg.jpg

Deep Blue's core team, Joe Hoane, Feng-hsiung Hsu, and Murray Campbell ^[5]

Selected Publications

1995 ...

Feng-hsiung Hsu, Murray Campbell, Joe Hoane (1995). Deep Blue System Overview. International Conference on Supercomputing

1996

Paul Hsieh (1996). Deep Blue - Deep Thought 2. Computer Chess Reports, Vol 5, No 3+4, pp. 45
Tony Marsland (ed.) (1996). The ACM Chess Challenge. pdf from the The Computer History Museum, Courtesy of ACM
Tony Marsland (1996). The Future of Computer Chess. ICCA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1
Jos Uiterwijk (1996). The Kasparov - Deep Blue Match. ICCA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1
Yasser Seirawan (1996). The Kasparov - Deep Blue Games. ICCA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1
Hans Berliner (1996). Why did Kasparov Blink? ICCA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2
Toshinori Munakata (1996). Thoughts on Deep Blue vs. Kasparov. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 39, No. 7, pdf

1997

Monroe Newborn (1997). Kasparov versus Deep Blue: Computer Chess Comes of Age. Springer ^[6]
Yasser Seirawan, Herbert Simon, Toshinori Munakata (1997). The Implications of Kasparov vs. Deep Blue. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 40, No. 8, pdf hosted from The Computer History Museum
Daniel C. Dennet (1997). Can Machines Think? Deep Blue and Beyond. ICCA Journal, Vol. 20, No. 4
Thomas Anantharaman (1997). Evaluation Tuning for Computer Chess: Linear Discriminant Methods. ICCA Journal, Vol. 20, No. 4
Richard Korf (1997). Does DEEP BLUE use Artificial Intelligence? ICCA Journal, Vol. 20, No. 4 ^[7]
Jonathan Schaeffer, Aske Plaat (1997). Kasparov versus Deep Blue: The Rematch. ICCA Journal, Vol. 20, No. 2
Tom R. Halfhill (1997). Searching for Deep Blue. BYTE, Vol. 22, No. 07
Carol McKenna Hamilton, Sara Hedberg (1997). Modern Masters of an Ancient Game. AI Magazine, Vol. 18, No. 4, pdf
Eric Hallsworth (1997). Deep[er] Blue2 vs Gary Kasparov - IBM Challenge - the Re-Match. Selective Search 70, pp. 19, pdf hosted by Mike Watters

AAAI Workshop

Robert Morris (ed.) (1997). Deep Blue Versus Kasparov: The Significance for Artificial Intelligence. Technical Report WS-97-04, AAAI Press ^[8] ^[9]

Richard Korf (1997). Does Deep Blue use AI? Deep Blue versus Kasparov, AAAI Workshop, pdf
Robert Levinson, Jeff Wilkinson (1997). Deep Blue is Still an Infant. Deep Blue versus Kasparov, AAAI Workshop
Dennis DeCoste (1997). The Future of Chess-Playing Technologies and the Significance of Kasparov Versus deep Blue. Deep Blue versus Kasparov, AAAI Workshop
Selmer Bringsjord, Adam Lally (1997). Chess Isn't Tough Enough: Better Games for Mind-Machine Competition. Deep Blue versus Kasparov, AAAI Workshop, pdf
Fernand Gobet (1997). Can Deep Blue™ make us happy? Reflections on human and artificial expertise. Deep Blue versus Kasparov, AAAI Workshop, pdf
Tony Marsland (1997). The Anatomy of Chess Programs. Deep Blue versus Kasparov, AAAI Workshop, pdf (95)
Carl W. Turner (1997). Attributing Intelligence to Humans and Machines: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue, See? Deep Blue versus Kasparov, AAAI Workshop, pdf
Tony Marsland, Yngvi Björnsson. (1997). From MiniMax to Manhattan. Deep Blue versus Kasparov, AAAI Workshop, pdf
Amol Dattatraya Mali, Amitabha Mukerjee (1997). Modularity Assumptions in Situated Agency. Deep Blue versus Kasparov, AAAI Workshop
Cyrus F. Nournai (1997). Multiagent Chess Games. Deep Blue versus Kasparov, AAAI Workshop, pdf
Kenneth M. Ford, Patrick J. Hayes (1997). What's Wrong With Hal? Deep Blue versus Kasparov, AAAI Workshop, pdf
Franz-Günter Winkler, Johannes Fürnkranz (1997). On Effort in AI Research: A Description Along Two Dimensions. Deep Blue versus Kasparov, AAAI Workshop
David Heath, Derek Allum (1997). The Historical Development of Computer Chess and its Impact on Artificial Intelligence. Deep Blue versus Kasparov, AAAI Workshop, pdf

1998 ...

Hans Berliner (1998). Review of Monty Newborn: Kasparov versus Deep Blue. pdf ^[10]
Feng-hsiung Hsu (1999). IBM’s Deep Blue Chess Grandmaster Chips. IEEE Micro, Vol. 19, No. 2, pdf
Murray Campbell (1999). Knowledge Discovery in Deep Blue. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 42, No. 11
Murray Campbell, Joe Hoane, Feng-hsiung Hsu (1999). Search Control Methods in Deep Blue. AAAI Technical Report SS-99-07, pdf, pdf