Deep Blue was a chess-playing computer developed by IBM. On May 11, 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 dismantled Deep Blue.Kasparov had beaten a previous version of Deep Blue in 1996.
The project was started as "ChipTest" at Carnegie Mellon University by Feng-hsiung Hsu, followed by its successor, Deep Thought. After their graduation from Carnegie Mellon, Hsu, Thomas Anantharaman, and Murray Campbell from the Deep Thought team were hired by IBM Research to continue their quest to build a chess machine that could defeat the world champion. Hsu and Campbell joined IBM in autumn 1989, with Anantharaman following later. Anantharaman subsequently left IBM for Wall Street and Arthur Joseph Hoane joined the team to perform programming tasks.Jerry Brody, a long-time employee of IBM Research, was recruited for the team in 1990. The team was managed first by Randy Moulic, followed by Chung-Jen (C J) Tan.
After Deep Thought's 1989 match against Kasparov, IBM held a contest to rename the chess machine and it became "Deep Blue", a play on IBM's nickname, Big Blue. After a scaled down version of Deep Blue, Deep Blue Jr., played Grandmaster Joel Benjamin, Hsu and Campbell decided that Benjamin was the expert they were looking for to develop Deep Blue's opening book, and Benjamin was signed by IBM Research to assist with the preparations for Deep Blue's matches against Garry Kasparov.
In 1995 "Deep Blue prototype" (actually Deep Thought II, renamed for PR reasons) played in the 8th World Computer Chess Championship. Deep Blue prototype played the computer program Wchess to a draw while Wchess was running on a personal computer. In round 5 Deep Blue prototype had the white pieces and lost to the computer program Fritz in 39 moves while Fritz was running on personal computer. In the end of the championship Deep Blue prototype was tied for second place with the computer program Junior while Junior was running on personal computer
Deep Blue is a massively parallel system designed for carrying out chess game tree searches. The system is composed of a 30-node (30-processor) IBM RS/6000 SP computer and 480 single-chip chess search engines, with 16 chess chips per SP processor. The SP system consists of 28 nodes with 120 MHz P2SC processors, and 2 nodes with 135 MHz P2SC processors. The nodes communicate with each other via a high speed switch. All nodes have 1GB of RAM, and 4 GB of disk. During the 1997 match with Kasparov, the system ran the AIX r4.2 operating system. The chess chips in Deep Blue are each capable of searching 2 to 2.5 million chess positions per second, and communicate with their host node via a microchannel bus.
Deep Blue is organized in three layers. One of the SP processors is designated as the master, and the remainder as workers. The master searches the top levels of the chess game tree, and then distributes leaf" positions to the workers for further examination. The workers carry out a few levels of additional search, and then distribute their leaf positions to the chess chips, which search the last few levels of the tree.
Overall system speed varied widely, depending on the specic characteristics of the positions being searched. For tactical positions, where long forcing move sequences exist, Deep Blue would average about 100 million positions per second. For quieter positions, speeds close to 200 million positions per second were typical. In the course of the 1997 match with Kasparov, the overall average system speed observed in searches longer than one minute was 126 million positions per second. The maximum sustained speed observed in this match was 330 million positions per second.
This machine type 7025 with a serial number of 3862/414 was very kindly donated by Roman Matiyenko, Support Team Leader, Department of Computer Science, King's College London, Strand
London.
