Deep Blue was a chess-playing computer developed by IBM. On 11 May
1997, the machine won a short 6 game exhibition match (not a world title match) by two wins to one
with 3 draws against world champion Garry Kasparov after Kasparov made a remarkable
blunder (for a world chess champion) in the opening of the last game.[1] Kasparov accused IBM of cheating and demanded a rematch, but IBM declined and retired Deep Blue.
Having won his earlier match with Deep Blue, he was nevertheless ahead in the total of 12 games with the computer by 6.5-5.5.
History
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 3 games and drew 2 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 3.5–2.5, ending on May 11th, 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 6 and 12 ply to a maximum of 40 ply 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.
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. Deep Blue's programmers
tailored the computer program to beat Kasparov by studying in great detail prior games Kasparov had played. 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.
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 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).
Kasparov's loss to Deep Blue inspired the creation of a new game called Arimaa which is still
played with a standard chess set, but which is also thought to be much more difficult for computers.
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 ply in the middlegame.
Deep Blue in popular culture
See also
References
- ^ Saletan, William (2007-05-11). Chess Bump: The triumphant teamwork of humans and computers. Slate.
External links
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