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Deep Blue (chess computer)

Deep Blue is a chess-playing computer developed by IBM. On 11 May 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 beat a previous version of Deep Blue in 1996.

Origins at Carnegie Mellon and move to IBM Research

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 fall 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.

Deep Blue versus Kasparov

On February 10, 1996, Deep Blue became the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world champion (Garry Kasparov) under regular time controls. Deep Blue - Kasparov, 1996, Game 1 is a famous chess game. However, Kasparov won three games and drew two 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 3½–2½, ending on May 11, finally ending in game six, and 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 computing power. It was a massively parallel, RS/6000 SP Thin P2SC-based system with 30-nodes, for a total of 30 120 MHz P2SC microprocessors (one microprocessor per node), 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.

The Deep Blue chess computer which defeated Kasparov in 1997 would typically search to a depth of between six and twelve plies to a maximum of forty plies in some situations. Levy and Newborn estimate that one additional ply increases the playing strength 50 to 70 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. 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, 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. Kasparov demanded a rematch, but IBM declined and dismantled Deep Blue. Due 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 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.

Feng-hsiung Hsu 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 (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).

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 software, 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 plies in the middlegame.

Deep Blue in popular culture

Deep Blue was seen on the Futurama episode "Anthology of Interest I" voiced by Tress MacNeille.
Servotron has a song entitled "Deep Blue, Congratulations" on their album Entertainment Program for Humans (Second Variety).
On the April 14, 2005 episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Stewart invited a fictional version of Deep Blue to comment on the recent extradition of former chess champion Bobby Fischer. Deep Blue didn't offer any analysis of any kind, and repeatedly suggested they play chess.
Deep Blue is a 1997 album and song by Peter Mulvey. The title song was inspired by the 1997 Kasparov match.
Deep Blue made an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and was parodied on Late Show with David Letterman.
Referenced in Pure Pwnage. Said to have been beaten by Teh_Masterer, who had used only a row of pawns and a single bishop.
In a Nike commercial, former San Antonio Spurs center David Robinson played Deep Blue in one-on-one basketball.
On the TV show Monkey Dust (Series 3 - Episode 6), in skit "They All Come Home", Lieutenant Al Jablonski walks into the hanger and asks a soldier, Hershburg, who he is playing chess with on the computer. Hershburg responds, "a little tin-can called Deep Blue".
On the TV show QI, Stephen Fry joked that part of Deep Blue was currently being used as a booking clerk for United Airlines.
Canadian rock band Our Lady Peace referenced Deep Blue in the track R. K. 1949-97 on the album Spiritual Machines.
British rock band Half Man Half Biscuit referenced Deep Blue in their song Bad Losers on Yahoo Chess with the line "Deep Blue, in '97 I voted for you as Sports Personality of the Year."