DEEP BLUE
Deep Blue was a chess-playing computer developed by IBM. On 11 May 1997, the
machine won a six-game match by two wins to one with three draws against world
champion Garry Kasparov. Kasparov accused IBM of cheating and demanded a
rematch, but IBM declined and retired Deep Blue.
Kasparov had won an earlier match against a previous version of Deep Blue in
1996.
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. Deep Blue - Kasparov, 1996, Game 1
is a famous chess game. However, Kasparov won three games and drew two of the
following games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2. 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 3½–2½,
ending on May 11, finally ending in game six. 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 derived its playing strength mainly out of brute force computing
power. It was a massively parallel, 30-node, RS/6000, SP-based computer system
enhanced with 480 special purpose VLSI chess chips. Its chess playing program
was written in C and ran under the AIX operating system. It was capable of
evaluating 200 million 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 would typically
search to a depth of between six and twelve plies to a maximum of forty plies in
some situations. An increase in search depth of one ply corresponds on the
average to an increase in playing strength of approximately 80 Elo points. Levy
and Newborn estimate that one additional ply increases the playing strength 50
to 70 points (Levy & Newborn 1991:192).
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 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 grandmasters Miguel Illescas,
John Fedorowicz and Nick de Firmian. When Kasparov requested that he be allowed
to study other games that Deep Blue had played so as to better understand his
opponent, IBM refused. However, Kasparov did study many popular PC computer
games to become familiar with computer game play in general.
After the loss, Kasparov said that he sometimes saw deep intelligence and
creativity in the machine's moves, suggesting that during the second game, human
chess players, in violation of the rules, intervened. IBM denied that it cheated,
saying the only human intervention occurred between games. The rules provided
for the developers to modify the program between games, an opportunity they said
they used to shore up weaknesses in the computer's play revealed during the
course of the match. This allowed the computer to avoid a trap in the final game
that it had fallen for twice before. Kasparov requested printouts of the machine's
log files but IBM refused, although the company later published the logs on the
Internet at http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/watch/html/c.shtml. Kasparov
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, the film implied that Deep Blue's heavily promoted
victory was a plot by IBM to boost its stock value.
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.
Feng-hsiung Hsu later claimed in his book Behind Deep Blue 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 a rematch (see also
Hsu's open letter about the rematch linked below). Kasparov's side responded
that Hsu's offer was empty and more of a demand than an offer because Hsu had no
sponsors, no money, no hardware, no technical team, just some patents and
demands that Kasparov commit to putting his formal world title on the line
before further negotiations could even begin (with no guarantees as to fair
playing conditions or proper qualification matches).
Deep Blue, with its capability of evaluating 200 million positions per second,
was the strongest computer that ever faced a world chess champion. Today, in
computer chess research and matches of world class players against computers,
the focus of play has often shifted to software chess programs, rather than
using dedicated chess hardware. Modern chess programs like Rybka, Deep Fritz or
Deep Junior are more efficient than the programs during Deep Blue's era. In a
recent match, Deep Fritz vs. Vladimir Kramnik in November 2006, the program ran
on a personal computer containing two Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs, capable of
evaluating only 8 million positions per second, but searching to an average
depth of 17 to 18 plies in the middlegame.
Deep Blue was seen on the Futurama episode "Anthology of Interest I" voiced by
Tress MacNeille.
Servotron has a song entitled "Deep Blue, Congratulations" on their album
Entertainment Program for Humans (Second Variety).
On the April 14, 2005 episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Stewart
invited a fictional version of Deep Blue to comment on the recent extradition of
former chess champion Bobby Fischer. Deep Blue didn't offer any analysis of any
kind, and repeatedly suggested they play chess.
Deep Blue is a 1997 album and song by Peter Mulvey. The title song was inspired
by the 1997 Kasparov match.
Deep Blue made an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and was parodied
on Late Show with David Letterman with Top Ten Ways Deep Blue is Celebrating its
Victory.
Referenced in Pure Pwnage. Said to have been beaten by Teh_Masterer, who had
used only a row of pawns and a single bishop.
In a Nike commercial, former San Antonio Spurs center David Robinson played Deep
Blue in one-on-one basketball.
Deep Blue was a chess-playing computer developed by IBM. On 11 May 1997, the
machine won a six-game match by two wins to one with three draws against world
champion Garry Kasparov. Kasparov accused IBM of cheating and demanded a
rematch, but IBM declined and retired Deep Blue.
Kasparov had won an earlier match against a previous version of Deep Blue in
1996.
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. Deep Blue - Kasparov, 1996, Game 1
is a famous chess game. However, Kasparov won three games and drew two of the
following games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2. 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 3½–2½,
ending on May 11, finally ending in game six. 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 derived its playing strength mainly out of brute force computing
power. It was a massively parallel, 30-node, RS/6000, SP-based computer system
enhanced with 480 special purpose VLSI chess chips. Its chess playing program
was written in C and ran under the AIX operating system. It was capable of
evaluating 200 million 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 would typically
search to a depth of between six and twelve plies to a maximum of forty plies in
some situations. An increase in search depth of one ply corresponds on the
average to an increase in playing strength of approximately 80 Elo points. Levy
and Newborn estimate that one additional ply increases the playing strength 50
to 70 points (Levy & Newborn 1991:192).
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 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 grandmasters Miguel Illescas,
John Fedorowicz and Nick de Firmian. When Kasparov requested that he be allowed
to study other games that Deep Blue had played so as to better understand his
opponent, IBM refused. However, Kasparov did study many popular PC computer
games to become familiar with computer game play in general.
After the loss, Kasparov said that he sometimes saw deep intelligence and
creativity in the machine's moves, suggesting that during the second game, human
chess players, in violation of the rules, intervened. IBM denied that it cheated,
saying the only human intervention occurred between games. The rules provided
for the developers to modify the program between games, an opportunity they said
they used to shore up weaknesses in the computer's play revealed during the
course of the match. This allowed the computer to avoid a trap in the final game
that it had fallen for twice before. Kasparov requested printouts of the machine's
log files but IBM refused, although the company later published the logs on the
Internet at http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/watch/html/c.shtml. Kasparov
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, the film implied that Deep Blue's heavily promoted
victory was a plot by IBM to boost its stock value.
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.
Feng-hsiung Hsu later claimed in his book Behind Deep Blue 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 a rematch (see also
Hsu's open letter about the rematch linked below). Kasparov's side responded
that Hsu's offer was empty and more of a demand than an offer because Hsu had no
sponsors, no money, no hardware, no technical team, just some patents and
demands that Kasparov commit to putting his formal world title on the line
before further negotiations could even begin (with no guarantees as to fair
playing conditions or proper qualification matches).
Deep Blue, with its capability of evaluating 200 million positions per second,
was the strongest computer that ever faced a world chess champion. Today, in
computer chess research and matches of world class players against computers,
the focus of play has often shifted to software chess programs, rather than
using dedicated chess hardware. Modern chess programs like Rybka, Deep Fritz or
Deep Junior are more efficient than the programs during Deep Blue's era. In a
recent match, Deep Fritz vs. Vladimir Kramnik in November 2006, the program ran
on a personal computer containing two Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs, capable of
evaluating only 8 million positions per second, but searching to an average
depth of 17 to 18 plies in the middlegame.
Deep Blue was seen on the Futurama episode "Anthology of Interest I" voiced by
Tress MacNeille.
Servotron has a song entitled "Deep Blue, Congratulations" on their album
Entertainment Program for Humans (Second Variety).
On the April 14, 2005 episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Stewart
invited a fictional version of Deep Blue to comment on the recent extradition of
former chess champion Bobby Fischer. Deep Blue didn't offer any analysis of any
kind, and repeatedly suggested they play chess.
Deep Blue is a 1997 album and song by Peter Mulvey. The title song was inspired
by the 1997 Kasparov match.
Deep Blue made an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and was parodied
on Late Show with David Letterman with Top Ten Ways Deep Blue is Celebrating its
Victory.
Referenced in Pure Pwnage. Said to have been beaten by Teh_Masterer, who had
used only a row of pawns and a single bishop.
In a Nike commercial, former San Antonio Spurs center David Robinson played Deep
Blue in one-on-one basketball.