Deep Blue

the name of a computer program that plays chess. In one second, it can analyse 100 million possible positions on the board. It was invented in 1985 by two students at Carnegie Mellon University in the US and developed at IBM. In 1989 Garry Kasparov, the World Chess Champion, defeated the computer in two matches. The program was later improved and in 1997 it defeated Kasparov in a match of six games.

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Computer chess-playing system designed by IBM.

In 1996 Deep Blue made history by defeating Garry Kasparov in one of their six games

the first time a computer had won a game against a world champion under tournament conditions. In the 1997 rematch, it won the deciding sixth game in only 19 moves; its 3.5–2.5 victory (it won two games and had three draws) marked the first time a current world champion had lost a match to a computer under tournament conditions. In its final configuration, the IBM RS6000/SP computer used 256 processors working in tandem, with an ability to evaluate 200 million chess positions per second.

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▪ 1997

      In February 1996 Gary Kasparov, the world's best chess-playing human, sat down against Deep Blue, the world's best chess-playing computer, for the start of a six-game match. When Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in the first game, the shock was felt around the world. Had machines finally reached the same level of intelligence as humans?

      The interest in having computers play chess began in about 1950. The first step was the development of an algorithm for constructing chess programs. Programmers "told" the computer certain rules it should follow (e.g., develop its pieces toward the centre of the board, get its king into safety, and attack its opponents' king). Further enhancements came with the ability of the computer to analyze numerous positions quickly.

      By the mid-1980s a computer called Hitech was strong enough to be rated in the lower ranks of the world's grand masters. In 1988 Deep Thought, the predecessor of Deep Blue, became the first computer to defeat a grand master. Deep Thought was soon capable of searching 750,000 positions per second (compared with one or two positions for humans). In 1989 Kasparov, world champion at that time, played Deep Thought in a two-game match and won both games.

      That same year a new project began at IBM, headed by Chung-Jen Tan. He was assisted by Feng-Hsiung Hsu, Murray Campbell, A. Joseph Hoane, and Gershon Brody. (Hsu and Campbell had worked on Deep Thought.) The result was Deep Blue, a 32-node IBM PowerParallel SP2 high-performance computer with 256 microprocessors working in tandem. The team improved the calculating speed so that Deep Blue could look at more than one billion positions per second. It also had a massive opening database based on one million games from the past 100 years and an endgame database (which was activated when only five chess pieces remained) holding billions of scenarios.

      In 1995 a match between Deep Blue and Kasparov was negotiated. Each participant would have two hours to make the first 40 moves, a common rate of play in human competition, and the winner would receive $400,000 out of a $500,000 purse. Experts were astounded when the computer beat back a dubious attack by Kasparov and made him resign on the 37th move in the first game. At first Kasparov was demoralized by the defeat, but, as he admitted later, it was the best thing that could have happened, because it forced him to treat Deep Blue as an opponent instead of just a machine.

      As the match progressed, Kasparov changed his strategy. He played sound chess and avoided weaknesses in his position, limiting Deep Blue's potential to attack his king. He aimed for positions that would cause the computer to have trouble in analyzing the position and make it unable to come up with a plan. Consequently, it made weak moves. Kasparov then built up a superior position that enabled him to win. After the initial loss, Kasparov won three and drew two for a 4-2 victory.

      Kasparov and the programmers for Deep Blue agreed to a rematch and scheduled it for May 1997. The programmers planned to upgrade the machine's sense of positional strategy so that Deep Blue could better analyze positions and be more flexible, but they admitted it would be a painstaking process.

      In the end, Kasparov demonstrated the flexibility and adaptability of human reasoning. Whether Deep Blue, or any machine, would ever be able to match that, only time would tell. (STEVEN MONTI)

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