Deep Blue
Encyclopedia
Computer chess
Computer chess is computer architecture encompassing hardware and software capable of playing chess autonomously without human guidance. Computer chess acts as solo entertainment , as aids to chess analysis, for computer chess competitions, and as research to provide insights into human...
developed by IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
. On May 11, 1997, the machine won a six-game match by two wins to one with three draws
Draw (chess)
In chess, a draw is when a game ends in a tie. It is one of the possible outcomes of a game, along with a win for White and a win for Black . Usually, in tournaments a draw is worth a half point to each player, while a win is worth one point to the victor and none to the loser.For the most part,...
against world champion
World Chess Championship
The World Chess Championship is played to determine the World Champion in the board game chess. Men and women of any age are eligible to contest this title....
Garry Kasparov
Garry Kasparov
Garry Kimovich Kasparov is a Russian chess grandmaster, a former World Chess Champion, writer, political activist, and one of the greatest chess players of all time....
. Kasparov accused IBM of cheating and demanded a rematch, but IBM refused and dismantled Deep Blue. Kasparov had beaten a previous version of Deep Blue in 1996.
Origins
The project was started as ChipTestChipTest
ChipTest was a 1985 chess playing computer built by Feng-hsiung Hsu, Thomas Anantharaman and Murray Campbell at Carnegie Mellon University. It is the predecessor of Deep Thought which in turn evolved into Deep Blue....
at Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
by Feng-hsiung Hsu
Feng-hsiung Hsu
Feng-hsiung Hsu is a computer scientist and the author of the book Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion...
, followed by its successor, Deep Thought
Deep Thought (chess computer)
Deep Thought was a computer designed to play chess. Deep Thought was initially developed at Carnegie Mellon University and later at IBM. It was second in the line of chess computers developed by Feng-hsiung Hsu, starting with ChipTest and culminating in Deep Blue...
. After their graduation from Carnegie Mellon, Hsu, Thomas Anantharaman
Thomas Anantharaman
Thomas S. Anantharaman is a computer statistician specializing in Bayesian inference approaches for NP complete problems. He is best known for his work with Feng-hsiung Hsu from 1985-1990 on the Chess playing computers ChipTest and Deep Thought at Carnegie Mellon University which led to his 1990...
, and Murray Campbell
Murray Campbell
Murray Campbell is a Canadian computer scientist.He is a Senior Manager in the Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, USA...
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
Joel Benjamin
Joel Benjamin is an American chess Grandmaster. In 1998, he was voted "Grandmaster of the Year" by the U.S. Chess Federation. , his Elo rating was 2576, making him the No. 12 player in the U.S. and the 214th-highest rated player in the world.-Life and career:Benjamin is a native of Brooklyn, New...
, Hsu and Campbell decided that Benjamin was the expert they were looking for to develop Deep Blue's opening book
Opening book
Chess opening book refers either to a book on chess openings, or to a database of chess openings used by chess programs.-Literature:Opening books, which discuss chess openings, are by far the most common type of literature on Chess play...
, 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
Deep Thought (chess computer)
Deep Thought was a computer designed to play chess. Deep Thought was initially developed at Carnegie Mellon University and later at IBM. It was second in the line of chess computers developed by Feng-hsiung Hsu, starting with ChipTest and culminating in Deep Blue...
II, renamed for PR reasons) played in the 8th World Computer Chess Championship. Deep Blue prototype played the computer program Wchess
Power Chess
Power Chess is a chess-playing video game originally released in September, 1996 by Sierra Entertainment for the Microsoft Windows 95 operating system.- Engine :...
to a draw while Wchess was running on a personal computer. In round 5 Deep Blue prototype had the white pieces
White and Black in chess
In chess, the player who moves first is referred to as "White" and the player who moves second is referred to as "Black". Similarly, the pieces that each conducts are called, respectively, "the white pieces" and "the black pieces". The pieces are often not literally white and black, but some...
and lost to the computer program Fritz
Fritz (chess)
Fritz is a German chess program developed by Frans Morsch and Mathias Feist and published by ChessBase. There is also a version called Deep Fritz that is designed for multiprocessing....
in 39 moves while Fritz was running on a 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 a personal computer.
Deep Blue versus Kasparov
On February 10, 1996, Deep Blue became the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world championDeep Blue - Kasparov, 1996, Game 1
Deep Blue–Kasparov, 1996, Game 1 is a famous chess game in which a computer played against a human being. It was the first game played in the 1996 Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov match, and the first time that a chess-playing computer defeated a reigning world champion under normal chess tournament...
(Garry Kasparov) under regular time controls. However, Kasparov won three and drew two of the following five games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2 (wins count 1 point, draws count ½ point). 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. Deep Blue won the deciding game six
Deep Blue - Kasparov, 1997, Game 6
The Sixth game of the Deep Blue - Kasparov rematch, played in New York City on May 11, 1997 and starting at 3:00 p.m. EDT, was the last chess game in the rematch of 1997 of Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov...
after Kasparov made a mistake in the opening, becoming the first computer system to defeat a reigning world champion in a match under standard chess tournament time controls.
The system derived its playing strength mainly out of brute force
Brute-force search
In computer science, brute-force search or exhaustive search, also known as generate and test, is a trivial but very general problem-solving technique that consists of systematically enumerating all possible candidates for the solution and checking whether each candidate satisfies the problem's...
computing power. It was a massively parallel
Massively parallel
Massively parallel is a description which appears in computer science, life sciences, medical diagnostics, and other fields.A massively parallel computer is a distributed memory computer system which consists of many individual nodes, each of which is essentially an independent computer in itself,...
, RS/6000 SP Thin P2SC-based system with 30 nodes, with each node containing a 120 MHz P2SC microprocessor
Microprocessor
A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...
for a total of 30, enhanced with 480 special purpose VLSI
Very-large-scale integration
Very-large-scale integration is the process of creating integrated circuits by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when complex semiconductor and communication technologies were being developed. The microprocessor is a VLSI device.The first semiconductor...
chess chips. Its chess playing program was written in C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
and ran under the AIX
AIX operating system
AIX AIX AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive, pronounced "a i ex" is a series of proprietary Unix operating systems developed and sold by IBM for several of its computer platforms...
operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer 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
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
according to the TOP500
TOP500
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year...
list, achieving 11.38 GFLOPS on the High-Performance LINPACK
LINPACK
LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Gilbert Stewart, and was intended for use on supercomputers in the 1970s and early 1980s...
benchmark.
The Deep Blue chess computer which defeated Kasparov
Garry Kasparov
Garry Kimovich Kasparov is a Russian chess grandmaster, a former World Chess Champion, writer, political activist, and one of the greatest chess players of all time....
in 1997 would typically search to a depth of between six and eight moves to a maximum of twenty or even more moves in some situations. Levy and Newborn estimate that one additional ply
Ply (game theory)
In two-player sequential games, a ply refers to one turn taken by one of the players. The word is used to clarify what is meant when one might otherwise say "turn"....
(half-move) increases the playing strength 50 to 70 Elo
Elo rating system
The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-born American physics professor....
points .
Deep Blue's evaluation function
Evaluation function
An evaluation function, also known as a heuristic evaluation function or static evaluation function, is a function used by game-playing programs to estimate the value or goodness of a position in the minimax and related algorithms...
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
Joel Benjamin
Joel Benjamin is an American chess Grandmaster. In 1998, he was voted "Grandmaster of the Year" by the U.S. Chess Federation. , his Elo rating was 2576, making him the No. 12 player in the U.S. and the 214th-highest rated player in the world.-Life and career:Benjamin is a native of Brooklyn, New...
. The opening library was provided by grandmasters Miguel Illescas
Miguel Illescas
Miguel Illescas Córdoba is a prominent Spanish grandmaster of chess.He was a highly skilled player as a youngster and became junior champion of Catalonia at the age of 12. A trained computer scientist, chess remained his real passion and continued progress brought him an International Master title...
, John Fedorowicz
John Fedorowicz
John Peter Fedorowicz from the Bronx area of New York is an American International Grandmaster of chess, and a chess writer....
, and Nick de Firmian
Nick de Firmian
Nicholas Ernest de Firmian , is a chess grandmaster and three-time U.S. chess champion, winning in 1987 , 1995, and 1998. He also tied for first in 2002, but Larry Christiansen won the playoff...
. 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.
Aftermath
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 had intervened on behalf of the machine, which would be a violation of the rules. 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 that were 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. Kasparov demanded a rematch, but IBM refused and dismantled Deep Blue. Owing to an insufficient sample of games between Deep Blue and officially rated chess players, a chess rating for Deep Blue was not established.In 2003 a documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
was made that explored these claims. Entitled Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine
Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine
Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine is a 2003 documentary film by Vikram Jayanti about the match between Garry Kasparov, the highest rated chess player in history and the World Champion for 15 years , and Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer created by IBM...
, 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
National Museum of American History
The National Museum of American History: Kenneth E. Behring Center collects, preserves and displays the heritage of the United States in the areas of social, political, cultural, scientific and military history. Among the items on display are the original Star-Spangled Banner and Archie Bunker's...
in their exhibit about the Information Age
Information Age
The Information Age, also commonly known as the Computer Age or Digital Age, is an idea that the current age will be characterized by the ability of individuals to transfer information freely, and to have instant access to knowledge that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously...
; the other rack appears at the Computer History Museum
Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum is a museum established in 1996 in Mountain View, California, USA. The Museum is dedicated to preserving and presenting the stories and artifacts of the information age, and exploring the computing revolution and its impact on our lives.-History:The museum's origins...
in their "Mastering The Game: A History of Computer Chess" exhibit.
Feng-hsiung Hsu
Feng-hsiung Hsu
Feng-hsiung Hsu is a computer scientist and the author of the book Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion...
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. 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 fastest 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
Rybka
Rybka is a computer chess engine designed by International Master Vasik Rajlich. , Rybka is one of the top-rated engines on chess engine rating lists and has won many computer chess tournaments...
, Deep Fritz or Deep Junior
Deep Junior
Junior is a computer chess program authored by the Israeli programmers Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky. Grandmaster Boris Alterman assisted, in particular with the opening book...
are more efficient than the programs during Deep Blue's era. In a recent match, Deep Fritz vs. world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik
Vladimir Kramnik
Vladimir Borisovich Kramnik is a Russian chess grandmaster. He was the Classical World Chess Champion from 2000 to 2006, and the undisputed World Chess Champion from 2006 to 2007...
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 thanks to heuristic
Heuristic
Heuristic refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. Heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution, where an exhaustive search is impractical...
s.
Kasparov's loss to Deep Blue inspired the creation of a new game called Arimaa
Arimaa
The objective of the game is to move a rabbit of one's own color onto the home rank of the opponent. Thus Gold wins by moving a gold rabbit to the eighth rank, and Silver wins by moving a silver rabbit to the first rank...
.
See also
- Anti-computer tactics
- ArimaaArimaaThe objective of the game is to move a rabbit of one's own color onto the home rank of the opponent. Thus Gold wins by moving a gold rabbit to the eighth rank, and Silver wins by moving a silver rabbit to the first rank...
- Deep Blue versus Garry KasparovDeep Blue versus Garry KasparovDeep Blue versus Garry Kasparov was a pair of famous six-game human-computer chess matches played between the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue and the World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov. The first match was played in February 1996 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Kasparov won the match 4–2, losing one...
- Deep Blue – Kasparov, 1996, Game 1
- Deep Blue – Kasparov, 1997, Game 6
- Artificial IntelligenceArtificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
- Watson (artificial intelligence software)Watson (artificial intelligence software)Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's first president, Thomas J...
External links
- IBM.com, IBM Research pages on Deep Blue
- IBM.com, IBM page with the computer logs from the games
- Chesscenter.com, Open letter from Feng-hsiung Hsu on the aborted rematch with Kasparov, The Week in ChessThe Week in ChessThe Week in Chess is one of the first, if not the first, Internet-based chess news services.TWIC has been edited by Mark Crowther since its inception in 1994. It began as a weekly Usenet posting, with "TWIC 1" being posted to Usenet group rec.games.chess on 17 September 1994...
Magazine, issue 270, 10 January 2000 - Chesscenter.com, Open Letter from Owen Williams (Gary Kasparov's manager), responding to Feng-hsiung Hsu, 13 January 2000
- Sjeng.org, Deep Blue system described by Feng-hsiung Hsu, Murray Campbell and A. Joseph Hoane Jr.
- Chessclub.com, ICC Interview with Feng-Hsiung Hsu, an online interview with Hsu in 2002 (annotated)