Deep Blue

This article is about the chess computer. If you are looking for the documentary movie "Deep Blue", see The Blue Planet.

Deep Blue was a chess-playing computer developed by IBM. In 1997, the machine defeated world champion Garry Kasparov.

History

Kasparov vs. Deep Blue

The computer system dubbed "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, and Deep Blue - Kasparov, 1996, Game 1 is a famous chess game. However, Kasparov won 3 games and drew 2 of the following games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4â€"2. The match concluded on February 17, 1996.

Deep Blue was then heavily upgraded (unofficially nicknamed "Deeper Blue") and played Kasparov again in May 1997, winning the six-game rematch 3.5â€"2.5, ending on May 11th. The final game is at Deep Blue - Kasparov, 1997, Game 6. Deep Blue thus became the first computer system to defeat a reigning world champion in a match under standard chess tournament time controls.

The project was started as "ChipTest" at Carnegie Mellon University by Feng-hsiung Hsu; the computer system produced was named Deep Thought after the fictional computer of the same name from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Hsu joined IBM (Research division) in 1989 and worked with Murray Campbell on parallel computing problems. Deep Blue was developed out of this. The name is a play on Deep Thought and Big Blue, IBM's nickname.

The system derives its playing strength mainly out of brute force computing power. It is a massively parallel, 30-node, RS/6000, SP-based computer system enhanced with 480 special purpose VLSI chess chips. Its chess playing program is written in C and ran under the AIX operating system. It was capable of evaluating 200,000,000 positions per second, twice as fast as the 1996 version. In June 1997, Deep Blue was the 259th most powerful supercomputer, capable of calculating 11.38 gigaflops, although this did not take into account Deep Blue's special-purpose hardware for chess.

The Deep Blue chess computer which defeated Kasparov in 1997 could search to a depth of 12 ply. Good human chess players look roughly 10 ply ahead. An increase in search depth of one ply corresponds on the average to an increase in playing strength of approximately 80 Elo points.

Deep Blue's evaluation function was initially written in a generalized form, with many to-be-determined parameters (e.g. how important is a safe king position compared to a space advantage in the center, etc.). The optimal values for these parameters were then determined by the system itself, by analyzing thousands of master games. The evaluation function had been split into 8,000 parts, many of them designed for special positions. In the opening book there were over 4,000 positions and 700,000 grandmaster games. The endgame database contained many six piece endgames and all five or fewer piece positions. Before the second match, the chess knowledge of the program was fine tuned by grandmaster Joel Benjamin. The opening library was provided by the grandmasters Miguel Illescas, John Fedorovich and Nick De Firmian.

After the lost match, Kasparov said that he sometimes saw deep intelligence and creativity in the machine's moves, which he could not understand. He also suggested that humans may have helped the machine during the match. He demanded a rematch, but IBM declined and retired Deep Blue. In 2003 a documentary film was made that explored these claims titled Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine (a film which implied that Deep Blue's heavily promoted victory was a plot by IBM to boost its market value).

In part these allegations were correct. The rules provided for the developers to modify the program between games, an opportunity they took with abandon. The code was modified between games to understand Kasparov's playstyle better, allowing it to avoid a trap in the final game that the AI had fallen for twice before.

One of the two racks that made up Deep Blue is on display at the National Museum of American History in their exhibit about the Information Age; the other rack appears at the Computer History Museum in their "Mastering The Game: A History of Computer Chess" exhibit.

Future

Feng-hsiung Hsu later claimed in his book Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion that he had the rights to use the Deep Blue design to build a bigger machine independently of IBM to take Kasparov's rematch offer, but Kasparov refused to agree to a rematch (see also Hsu's open letter about the rematch linked below).

Kasparov's loss to Deep Blue has inspired the creation of a new game called Arimaa which is still played with a standard chess set, but is much more difficult for computers.

The game of Go is considered by many in the field of artificial intelligence to be a much better measure of a computer's capacity for thought than chess, as it poses serious challenges to artificial intelligence in many aspects. So far, the best Go programs can still be beaten by lower-than-average club players (average club players are taken to be around 4-6 kyu). While many different approaches have been tried, the level of the best Go playing programs is still lowOn 11 Jul 2006, Senseis Libary mentions there is much yet to be done in the field of computer Go. See computer Go for more details..

* Documentary video about Kasparov vs Deep Blue, 2nd game
* Deep Blue's games at chessgames.com
* Complete games from the first match with Kasparov
* Play through the Garry Kasparov vs Deep Blue 1997 games
* IBM Research pages on Deep Blue
* IBM page with the computer logs from the games
* Open letter from Feng-hsiung Hsu on the aborted rematch with Kasparov
* Deep Blue system described by Feng-hsiung Hsu, Murray Campbell and A. Joseph Hoane Jr.

Deep Blue: Encyclopedia BETA

Contents

Deep Blue

History

Future

Deep Blue in Popular Culture

References

See also

External links