The Biography of a true Monster Chess Computer

Go back to the Deep Blue Index

Timeline

• 1998 -"Deep Thought" was born at Carnegie Mellon University running on a Sun Workstation, it computed 800,000 chess positions per second.
• 1988 - Deep thought obtains a USCF rating of 2551. Not shabby, but not word championship caliber either.
• 1989 - Deep Thought won its first chess tournament, The World Computer Chess Championship with a total score of 5-0
• 1990 - Deep Thought plays Garry Kasparov a 2-game match in New York. Kasparov easily defeats the computer.
• 1991 - Deep Thought transforms into Deep Thought II running on an IBM/6000 computer. Now it is examing 7 million chess positions per second.
• 1993 -Deep Thought is renamed to Deep Blue.
• 1996 - Deep Blue and Kaparov meet in a 6 game match. Kasparov defeats the computer but not by much.
• 1997 - A year that will live on in chess infamy. Kasparov loses to Deep Blue in a 6 game match.
• 1999 - IBM disassembles the Deep Blue team. Deep Blue never plays again.
  Facts
• Deep Blue is a massively parallel, 32-node RISC System RS/6000 SP computer system built by IBM
• Deep Blue took 5 years and 10s of millions of dollars to build
• Deep Blue weighs a foot smashing 1.4 tons.
• Deep Blue could consider 200 million positions per second.
• Deep Blue could calculate 200 billion moves in three minutes, the time allotted for each move. A human grandmaster may be able to calculate 500 moves in three minutes.
• Deep Blue was not the first computer to take on a world champion in a beloved game. In August 1994 the greatest checkers player who ever lived, a 67-year-old born-again math professor named Dr. Marion Tinsley, faced the toughest challenge of a long career: Chinook, a.k.a. The Beast, a program written by Canadian computer scientist Jonathan Schaeffer. Dr. Tinsley lost.
• Deep Blue's programming code is written in C and runs under the AIX UNIX operating system.
• Deep Blue does not use any artificial intelligence. It relies on brute force to calculate its wins.
• Deep Blue is the first chess player to be on the cover of newsweek magazine since Bobby Fisher. (Read the article now!)
• One poll proved that 50% of Americans recognize Deep Blue...more than the percent that recognize Kasparov!
• Kasparov lost the first game of the 6 game match in 1996. This is considered the most shocking chess game of all time! Kasparov would go on to win the match however.
• Deep Blue used a team of grandmasters to help prepare its opening book specifically against Kasparov. Many think this was unfair.
• The actual computing machine that defeated Kasparov in 1997 was a borrowed machine. It was actually pre-sold to a corporate customer. Of course the chess chips would be taken out before the million dollar machine was shipped! Later, this machine would be sold to the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.. The machine is not yet on display.
• The 1997 match between Deep Blue and Kasparov generated $500 million of free publicity for IBM. IBM's stock went up over $10 million dollars immediatly after the match.
• IBM reportedly refused all rematch requests from Gary Kasparov.
• Deep Blue was featured on the animated television series Futurama on the Fox network. Deep Blue was charged with the task of protecting the Earth's time-space continuum, with help from Al Gore and Star Trek's Lt. Uhura.
• Deep Blue was used as a research tool by IBM. It was used as a benchmark for more powerful computers, such as ASCII White. ASCII White is 1,000 times more powerful
  than Deep Blue and is used to simulate nuclear testing for the Department of Energy.