Behind Deep Blue

ianb104 writes "I was rushing home to catch the ending part of game 6 of the 1997 Kasparov vs. Deep Blue match, when the news came over the car radio that Kasparov resigned after less than one hour of play, to my great dismay. Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion brought back this memory and then some." Read on for the rest of Ian's review.

Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion
author	Feng-hsiung Hsu
pages	298
publisher	Princeton University Press
rating	9
reviewer	ianb104
ISBN	0691090653
summary	A real-life historic triumph of the nerds

My wife gave me this book as a birthday present. I was thrilled that finally someone wrote what really happened behind the scenes at the two historic matches, but Behind Deep Blue turned out to be far more than just about the matches. The early part of the book is equally absorbing and full of surprises.

Who & What

Feng-hsiung Hsu, the author, was the father of the Deep Blue project and a troublemaker. When you see a section title like "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" in a book about computer history, you know something is up. What he did in this particular section would have been an awful career move today, like landing him in a jail. As it was, he almost got kicked out of grad school. This precarious position played an important role in how the project got started.

The book has two main parts: the beginning and the history of the project at Carnegie Mellon University, and the successful conclusion at IBM, including the two matches with Kasparov.

Carnegie Mellon

During the matches, the IBM web site de-emphasized the Carnegie Mellon part of the project. The instant chess books also failed to fill the void. It was a shame.

The main ideas behind the project apparently were formed at Carnegie Mellon--several of them at a fateful night in Hsu's apartment. I know little about IC design, but his description of the new ideas discovered at that night, underlying the first single chip chess move generator, made me feel like that I could design the chip myself. His thought process in coming to the discovery is also quite interesting. Hsu seems to be a diehard Trekkie. In his description of the selective search algorithm "singular extensions," he repeatedly used the Starship Enterprise in his analogies.

For fans of AI, the book contains a big surprise. Even though Deep Blue's triumph over Kasparov might be considered as a major victory for AI, several of the early members involved in its creation had a definite anti-AI opinion. An exact quote from the book is "AI is bullshit." Hsu himself had an ambiguous feeling toward AI. The main approach taken by the Deep Blue project was to push the technology envelope, which is certainly non-AI, but he also talked of the need for chess knowledge repeatedly in the book.

The central story at Carnegie Mellon revolves around the rivalry between a ragtag group of graduate students and a powerful professor, Dr. Hans Berliner, who is a former World Correspondence Chess Champion and world renowned authority on computer games. I have a feeling that there are things left unsaid in the book, but the intensity of the rivalry and the male egos all come through clearly. One of the thorny points to the students, strangely enough, was that they were not Dr. Berliner's students but the press kept on saying they were.

After the students came out with Deep Thought, the first Grandmaster strength computer, the incorrect press perception produced a very funny story. The story of "The Poor Lieutenant Colonel at Darpa" tells how an overzealous reporter wrote a cover article for the British magazine Spectator, purporting to have discovered that the U.S. Department of Defense had enlisted the service of chess computers. In the process of this discovery, the reporter phoned Dr. Berliner, whom the reporter thought was heading the Deep Thought project, for the inside scoop, and afterwards cold called a Lieutenant Colonel at Darpa in charge of expert systems research, which had nothing to do with the Deep Thought work...

IBM

I did not realize that the Deep Blue team played Kasparov publicly three times. The first time was with the machine Deep Thought, during the transitional period when the team moved to IBM. Kasparov won that match 2-0. The publicity from this match and the subsequent confusion between "Deep Thought" and "Deep Throat" were partially responsible for the new Deep Blue name. The original Deep Thought name came from the sci-fi trilogy Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy.

The story of the completion of the first Deep Blue repeats a theme that recurs throughout the book--the machines always barely work in time. "Four Hours to Spare" describes a period when the first Deep Blue chip had to be used in a new program and had to win or tie an exhibition match, in order for the project to survive. The team barely got the new program "working" with four hours to spare. They managed a tie.

The late-to-arrive situation in the 1996 Deep Blue match itself was not much better--the very first ever game played by Deep Blue was none other than its first game with Kasparov. Deep Blue itself was being put together only weeks before. Deep Blue won this game. What Kasparov said right after the historic game is priceless. There should have been a microphone at the playing table. The behind-the-scenes coverage of this match is more detailed than available anywhere else, but not quite as extensive as that of the final match in the book.

Deep Blue's loss in 1996 spurred a series of activities by the team. I don't recall seeing them mentioned explicitly during the 1997 match. A new Deep Blue chip was designed, along with new software tools for match preparations. The story of "The Phantom Queens" is quite amusing. The team discovered a design bug in the new chip that caused phantom queens to be generated on the chip's internal chessboard. One way to fix the bug was to slow down the chip by disabling a design feature. As a result of this slowdown, we have the only match outcome of what might have happen if Deep Blue had been running at the same speed as commercial chess programs when competing against them. I will let you find out for yourself what the outcome was. A workaround was later implemented, and Deep Blue did not suffer the same slowdown in the match against Kasparov.

The big chapter on the 1997 match alone is worth the price of the book for me. It was a great deal of fun to read. The wild accusations, the missed opportunities, the psychological war game off the board, the battle through the media, and plain simple misunderstanding all make for wonderful reading. The arbiter, Carol Jarecki, summed it up quite well, "This match has it all." I don't want to spoil all the fun for you, but I will mention two interesting tidbits from game 1 and game 6. Deep Blue played the last move of game 1 as a result of bug, although the game was already lost. Kasparov's team was surprised by the move and spent all night to find out why Deep Blue played the move and concluded that Deep Blue played its move because it saw a very deep mate if it had played what should be played... Game 6 was widely reported as Kasparov forgetting his own opening preparations. It could very well have been a deliberate gamble instead. All the other programs at the time, including the 1996 version of Deep Blue, very possibly would have lost the white side of the game.

Other Stuff

The epilogue of the book contains a short description of what happened after 1997, including an aborted attempt to answer Kasparov's repeated challenge for a new match. The first appendix gives autobiographic materials. The other two give selected game scores and pointers for further reading.

General Comments

This is not a chess book, and you don't need to be a chess player to enjoy it. The few paragraphs on technology should be readable for high school students or younger kids with scientific interests. Or you can just skip them.

The book is not really one contiguous story, but a collection of short stories and anecdotes. I read the whole book in one setting, but you could easily read the book in smaller chunks at a time.

Quibbles

Okay, you probably don't need an index for this book, but it would have been nice to have one. Interestingly enough, at www.bn.com, the review mentioned "a strange, inaccurate index", which must have there in the prepublication copy.

Conclusions

I highly recommend the book for general reading. You are not going to learn how to build something like Deep Blue from this book, but you get a good sense of what kind of human struggles it takes. Computer scientists and electrical engineers should get a good kick out of the book, but a layperson can enjoy the book just as well. If you have young kids with interests in engineering or science, this might be a good gift for them.

---

You can purchase Behind Deep Blue from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited

move game. True, human's can't interpret the billions of possible moves, and only understand basic repeated patterns (try it with you local grandmaster, they can memorize any board of a game in play, but can't memorize a randomly placed board). True, human pattern recognition is far better than machines, but in the end chess is just billions of possible moves, and now that computers can process far enough into the game, they need never lose.

True AI would be a real thinking, feeling machine, and I'm not sure if that's possible. Perhaps the day when we see a computer sit down and ponder it's origins, and even pray, then we can think we've created an AI ( but will it have a soul?).

Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited

True AI would be a real thinking, feeling machine,

Thinking yes, feeling no; that would be AE, and I don't see much point in that.

Anyway, I do believe Deep Blue had intelligence, just in a very narrow way. Why? Because humans playing chess is seen as a sign of intelligence in humans, because before we built a chess playing computer we thought it would be an intelligent thing for a computer to do.

Just that you know, and are able to understand how it does it, does not mean it's not intelligent.

But of course, stupendously narrowly intelligent :-). It couldn't recognize a chess piece if it had a .png of one. General AI is, of course, a very different beast. But suppose we solve that problem and you'll still be able to understand how it works - wouldn't it still be general AI?

And feeling... nah, in us that's a result of our evolution, but general intelligence doesn't need it.

Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited

Anyway, I do believe Deep Blue had intelligence, just in a very narrow way. Why? Because humans playing chess is seen as a sign of intelligence in humans, because before we built a chess playing computer we thought it would be an intelligent thing for a computer to do.

It is possible to play chess either by raw computation or intelligence. People use their intelligence to play chess. Deep Blue did not.

Here's an analogy that works for me. A computer can be easily programmed to determine that 1000000003 is not a sum of two square by exhaustive computation. No one (I hope) would contend that is an intelligent computer program. On the other hand, if a person (or a computer program) independently realized that it is a consequence of 3 not being the sum of two squares mod 4, I would regard this is at least a narrow intelligence. Deep Blue took the exhaustive computation approach to chess.

Re:Would we want our computers to have feeling?

[user@localhost ~]$gcc -o hello hello.c

bash: gcc: command not found

[user@localhost ~]$which gcc

I don't know. Nevermind.

[user@localhost ~]$wtf?

I shouldn't have to tell you what's wrong...

Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited

but in the end chess is just billions of possible moves, and now that computers can process far enough into the game, they need never lose.

What you say is true is true, but in the past, chess seemed like a problem that computers would never "understand" and thus would always be second to humans. Even though the solution may not seem elegant, it nonetheless works.

This solution may not have been imaginable forty years ago. Perhaps forty years from now, we'll be able to brute force "a real thinking, feeling machine."

A great book for idiots like me on how true AI may be possible is Marvin Minsky's Society of the Mind [amazon.com].

Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited

now that computers can process far enough into the game, they need never lose.

There are actually two major branches of thought on the matter, neither one is proven. The statement you make is one such branch of thought, that can be stated more precisely as:

A perfectly played game of chess will never result in a loss, and will only result in a tie if the opponent also plays a perfect game

However there is also another school of thought, which points out the lie in your statement. This thought can be stated as:

In chess, strategy is equally important to board condition. There are most likely branches of play that look to be promising but that a significantly skilled chess player can turn into a win.

The reasoning behind this is that there is no single opening move that results in the entire game-tree having no checkmates for one player. And that no subsequent move can prune out checkmates, until the end-game. Thus, a perfect player could possibly get itself into a situation where a check mate is forced on it.

I don't know whether that's true or not. One part of me says yes, that seems true, while another part of me says, why doesn't the program just choose a path where any move it can make results in an end-game with no checkmates with itself. I'm not sure such a path exists; even if it does, I would call a system built to choose this path AI.

Artificial Intelligence has absolutely nothing to do with emulating HUMAN intelligence, as you seem to believe. Artifical Intelligence is about embuing a machine with the ability to go beyond it's basic programming.

Certainly a chess program can never truly go beyond it's programming; which is to win a game of chess. But what about it's basic programming; a few thousand lines of code written by a team. It can take those lines of code and make assumptions, strategies, tactics, and observations. This most certainly is beyond it's basic programming, which really just included a set of the rules for chess and a way to look ahead a few dozen moves predictively.

Such a system would certainly qualify, in my eyes, as AI.

Would Poker be a good AI test?

Since chess moves are limited to a certain domain, what *would* be a good game for creating and/or testing an AI computer system?

You would think that Poker would be a good choice (real poker, not Video Poker [littlecutie.net]). You don't win just by playing the odds -- you have to gauge your opponents' playing style and determine when they're bluffing and when you should bluff. I know how tough that is... I lost $40 to one guy in high school playing nickel-ante poker (do you still have that watch, Ted?).

But so much of that kind of poker depends on body language... setting a CRT in one of the chairs just wouldn't be the same.

Now, when they make a computer that can play An Enchanted Evening [gamegallery.com], I'll be impressed! (And maybe a little creeped out...)

Re:Would Poker be a good AI test?

Go is surprisingly difficult to play well; we have yet to build a computer that can beat a moderately skilled human player.

And, Moore's law not withstanding, we probably won't be able to build a computer to brute force the problem. It'll HAVE to be solved by an AI that thinks and strategizes, instead of one that just computes the entire game tree and picks the best branch.

Another game that seems surprisingly difficult to program well is Monopoly; the value of any particular piece of property for trading is a complex algorithm involving not only the player's personal desire, but the value the opponent may place on that piece of property as well as the value that every other opponent MAY be able to place on it at any point in the future. It doesn't seem hard, I just think the hardcore AI guys don't consider a contemporary board game worthy of their attention.

Of course if I could pick a contemporary game that would be the ultimate AI test, I'd go with Turing's approach and pick Dungeons and Dragons. Because there's no way to brute force the thing EVER, and it requires GENERAL problem solving and logic algorithms...

Don't try to stop me!

I was rushing home to catch the ending part of game 6 of the 1997 Kasparov vs. Deep Blue match

Yeah, tonight I'm rushing home. I've got paint drying in the living room. Don't wanna miss a single moment!

Deep Blue good chess player....not strategist

Deep Blue was a good machine. It could analyze all possible moves and choose the "best". The only reason it really won in the end was it because it psyched Kasprov out. If a computer was able to make that many computations with a chess game, I too would be scared to play it.

This book is a cover-up

From everything else I read at the time from major news sources and so forth, the Deep Blue match wasn't as much a leap in technology as a marketing scheme for IBM.

Deep Blue was powerful, and it could predict nearly every possible move in the future, but the match was rigged -- the programmers ran heavy analysis of Kasparov's moves, but Kasparov himself never got to see one line of Deep Blue's algorithm/source codes. It had little to do with advancing AI and search algorithms on a supercomputer, and more to defeat Kasparov publically so consumers would gain more confidence in IBM.

Deep Blue could have been easily defeated if it was open source -- computers are only as smart as the humans that program them are, and one flaw in the code could easily be exploited for a laughable victory... Perhaps even a 4 move beginning checkmate?

Re:This book is a cover-up

From what I've heard, Deep Blue's chess algorithms aren't incredibly "clever", i.e. they don't use special tricks designed to beat humans that you could discover in the code. It's a straight forward brute force approach.

It's not just brute force, otherwise the programmers wouldn't have needed to adjust it between matches (presumably to compensate for Kasparov's playing style.) It's not like the programmers thought, "gee if Deep Blue only had a few billion more moves thought out, it would have won," and then went and instantly and significantly improved their brute force algorithm. The adjustments they made in between matches must have been specific strategies against Kasparov, which is then like having a groups of chess experts plus a super computer against one man under pressure.

Deep Blue only showed that computer tools can give would be runners-up the edge over the favorite, which isn't surprising or remarkable.

Re:This book is a cover-up

Barring a programming error, knowledge of the source code would not have helped Gary Kasparov. Even though he might not have access to the code itself, all these chess programs work in essentially the same way. Namely, the computer will generate all the possible moves, and all the possible responses to each move and all the possible responses to that move, ad infinitum. The really good ones can go about 12 levels deep (not quite sure how many Deep Blue could handle). For each end position, a score is assigned. The computer then picks the first move based on the end position it thinks is best and assuming its opponent will always play his best possible move. It's all based on what's called the "Alpha-Beta" search algorithm.

The moral of the story is that Gary surely knew the basics oh how Deep Blue worked. In the end however, the brute processing power of Deep Blue is what triumphed, not strategy. With the increasing power of computers, there is no turning back. Soon enough, we'll all have computers powerful enough to beat any Grand Master. It's just a matter of time. The complexity is certainly not in the chess program itself.

Re:This book is a cover-up

>The really good ones can go about 12 levels deep
>(not quite sure how many Deep Blue could
>handle). For each end position, a score is
>assigned. The computer then picks the first move
>based on the end position it thinks is best and
>assuming its opponent will always play his best
>possible move. It's all based on what's called
>the "Alpha-Beta" search algorithm.

Deep Blue went on average 12 levels deep, current top programs can go over 16 in the middlegame and much more in the endgame.

What you describe is minimax, not alpha-beta. alpha-beta is an optimization that cuts branches that cannot affect the result.

--
GCP

the press ?

<Bitching>

"...the incorrect press perception produced a very funny story."

When did any new scientific/technical stuff did not get messed with in the non-scientific press ?
And the story usually are not funny to read when you were interviewed. Either the journalist have to be taught how to do some basic reality check in high-tech, or high-tech people have to learn "how to communicate with press 101".

</Bitching>

Mr. Rogers?

"When you see a section title like "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" in a book about computer history, you know something is up."

Do I?

"What he did in this particular section would have been an awful career move today, like landing him in a jail. "

Wear knitted sweaters all the time?
Slowly change shoes while singing?

Recent computer matches vrs humans

kind of off topic but Deep Blue was not the end all of computer chess. todays programs are argueably stronger now (we'll never know as IBM destroyed deep blue after the match). A very recent match between Kramink (the now world champion having defeated Kasparov) and Deep Fritz (a program you can actually buy www.chessexpress.com) ended in a draw. Seems that humans aren't down and out just yet in the chess arena.

Re:Recent computer matches vrs humans

You're right: Humans aren't down and out yet by any stretch. However, humans are subject to psychological exhaustion, and computers (presumably) are not. For example, in one game in his match against Deep Fritz, Kramnik launched a spectacular and speculative attack--Deep Fritz found the correct defense, and wound up with an advantage, but no clear win. But after seeing the wind go out of the attack he had been struggling with, Kramnik resigned the position, believing it to be lost. Had Kramnik been able to switch to playing defensively at that point, he probably would have forced a draw (and won the match).

What the Deep Fritz team discovered was they needed to keep the Queens on the board--essentially, it is the old cliche about computers vs. human chess players: The computers are generally better at tactics, and the humans are better at understanding the position.

What's the quote?

What Kasparov said right after the historic game is priceless.

So what did he say? Seems kinda dumb just to leave it like that.

Behind Deep Blue eh?

Its gotta be dusty behind there! Imagine having to move that to vacuum, its bad enough moving my couch!

why not deep blue2?

the recent 'man vs machine' match between kramnik and deep fritz resulted in a draw, and there is another match between kasparov and deep junior in january 2003.

deep fritz was run on an 8-cpu intel workstation, and i'm assuming that deep junior will run on a machine with similar specs. it is likely that both junior and fritz use more advanced algorithms than those used on deep blue (the source code for deep thought is online somewhere). deep fritz in the kramnik match was doing 6M moves/sec and deep blue did 1.1M moves/sec.

computing power has come a long way since 1997. if IBM or even SGI put together a chess supercomputer written with current algorithms, wouldn't the smarter algorithms + raw processing power crush the top grandmasters? It would definatly be a boost for PR and the cost to the company would be marginal if they stuck to standard hardware.

I'd like to see a modified deep fritz running on the Earth Simulator [top500.org] vs a FIDE dream team of grandmasters. [fide.com]

More on Deep Blue vs Deep Fritz

OK. First the "lineage of the machine". First was chiptest, then a couple of years later deep thought was "born". It played chess until early 1996 when deep blue 1 was put together for the first Kasparov match. Then DB 2 was built (redesigned chips, more of them, etc) for the second match.

In 1995, Fritz beat deep thought in the 1995 WCCC event in Hong Kong with a opening book cook. Had nothing to do with deep blue other than it was the machine prior to deep blue 1.

Fritz is a PC program. Nothing to do with a special-purpose hardware design made especially to play chess like deep blue.

The real story here

Is the Deep Blue won in '97 as a result of a bug.

That is a very revealing revelation, as it goes it speaks to the notion of what makes machines different than people.

If the computer was working properly, it would have resigned. Instead, a bug forced it to make a move that threw Kasparov off balance and won the game.

You cannot capture tactics like that in an algorithim. Only true sentience or a computer bug allows for that.

Somewhere behind deep blue

Is a Grandmaster chess player yelling, "Don't pay any attention to the man behind that mainframe!"

--Quote adapted from Frank Oz.

One game which Kasparov did win

I still remember that Kasparov won one game in the match. What he did in that game was to play moves which are supposedly anti-chess. Normally the computer expects you to make the best move and prepares accordingly( it an calculate a lot of other moves too but its fairly surprising that even the best chess programs are stumped by the simplest of moves.)WHat Kasparov did in that game was that he did not make the right moves. But the problem is that you cant always come up with moves which are utterly stupid, especially if you are Kasparov (for me its effortless to comeup with such moves). Atleast thats what one analyst said. I dont know if that holds true with today's progerams too. I have been trying to beat Fritz for a long time but no matter how stupid a move I may make, I always end up losing. So either I am using AI(no way I can make smart enough moves with my normal I) which the computer can figure out or the programs have improved.

Deep blue was a Hoax!

Bobby Fischer was hidden in the "Computer room." He was the one who really beat Gary Kasparov.

Isn't the greatest story of this the human element

The underlying fear that makes the whole story interesting isn't that deep blue beat kasparov. It's a concrete example of technology dehumanizing and demoralizing a Grand Master. It has all the baggage of "fear of technology". It's all those fears movies like Terminator, War Games and other less notable movies try to explore. Who cares about deep blue. Lets talk about how fear of technology and loosing control make people obsess over the games deep blue played against kasparov.

A solved game

Chess will be to a computer as tic tac toe is to
to anyone over the age of 8 and Cowboy neal.

Kasparov's Reaction & chess geek link

One thing I'd like to learn from the book is what was IBM's reaction to Kasparov's accusation that one of their Grandmaster consultants made a move. I can't remember which game it was but there was one game that Kasparov was sure that he was playing the software right up until one move when he was absolutly sure that a human had interveened.

Also, if you're interested in chess programs from a programmer point of view this link [chessopolis.com] has quite a few links to various tutorials on chess playing algorithms as well as many different free Winboard engines.

we have a winner!

The verdict is in! The award for the most pathetic thing I have ever heard on Slashdot goes to ianb104 for saying, "I was rushing home to catch the ending part of game 6 of the 1997 Kasparov vs. Deep Blue match..."

-gerbik

Deep blue was a fraud

As much as I like IBM for their support of GNU/Linux and other Free/Open-Source Software, Deep Blue is just a fraud.

The fact is, the machine was reprogrammed DURING the chess match. Gee, go figure. The people at IBM built it SPECIFICALLY to beat Kasparov, and it was promptly dismantled after the game, leaving Kasparov with no opportunity for a rematch. Also, who else did this Deep Blue play that was any good? More proof that it was designed to play against Kasparov's style.

Sorry, but there was heavy and reasonably criticism of Deep Blue, and IBM didn't alleviate matters by having it dismantled before a rematch could be worked out, or before any other top players could have played it.

I'm sure I'm starting to sound like a broken...

...record, but give up on chess already. If the computer doesn't beat the human expert this time, it won't be long.

But go players won't be bested by computers for some time to come. I personally find it a bit depressing playing a game that a computer can beat me at, but with go, I can beat the best programs I've tried, which not long ago were the best in the world. Humans are far more challenging opponents to someone who's studied go part time for a few years.

It's not the Computer playing the perfect game....

Understanding why computers may never dominate chess at the elite levels, you have to understand something about chess history and the nature of elite chess players, their study habits, and how they learn.

Great chess players spend weeks preparing for a tournament. They look over all the best games that have been played and look for improvements. To some extent, the matches are already won or lost before the games even start. Even if the game moves out of established "theory" early on, the player can still rely upon the principles he or she remembers from studying other games. At the truly elite levels, chess players can spend months and months working on a specific move in a specific variation designed to beat a specific opponent. They study the games previously played by their opponent and look for weakness, often employing computers and thousand of man-hours of effort, checking and double checking every reasonable combination of moves.

This is one of the reasons, I personally, do not believe computers will ever truly triumph. Someone earlier pointed out that the perfect game would always end in a draw, but what people have to realize is that most human games at the high levels of competition are virtually perfect. And if they make a mistake on a given day (even a minescule one, not noticeable to the vast majority of us patzers) they will correct it next time. You gotta remember that every game played by an elite computer against an elite human instantly becomes part of the canon of chess knowledge. In a sense, every game of chess played comes closer and closer to the perfect game.

Deep Blue = Deep Cheat

Most of you here don't know this, but the match of Deep Blue v. Kasparov was extremely unfairly tilted against Kasparov.

1. IBM specifically built Deep Blue to play Kasparov, not to be a general-purpose chess machine.
2. Deep Blue was reprogrammed between matches. Again, extremely unfair. As if normal opponents can "reprogram themselves" between matches. This is the equivalent of switching opponents in the middle of a chess match.
3. Fischer was not allowed to study any of Deep Blue's previous games, or to play matches against Deep Blue to familiarize himself with Deep Blue, yet Deep Blue was given extensive knowledge of Kasparov's styles specifically. In fair tournaments, each player has the opportunity to study the other. Kasparov did not have that opportunity.

In short, this was one of the most unfair matches in chess history. All IBM proved is that if you cheat enough and put the other player at enough of an unfair disadvantage, you can win, even if they are the second greatest ever (Fischer is the greatest ever). This was nothing more than a publicity stunt by IBM to get more recognition and money, and they did it by mandating that Kasparov agree to a fundamentally unfair match.

It is interesting that in the game in which Kasparov won, he played anti-chess, using very unorthidox "non-best" moves. Interestingly, this is what its rumored that Fischer is doing now-a-days in his annonymous online blitz games, starting out with very unorthidox openings (i.e., moving all pawns forward).

The best games of the last century were played by Fischer and Kasparov. The thing that we're looking for this century is Fischer v. Kasparov, the match the chess world deserves to see.

Deep Blue vs. Deep Blue

I'm curious--what exactly happens when Deep Blue plays another instance of Deep Blue? Would having a chessmaster observe a series of games like this create an advantage? Also, how does Deep Blue determine what it's most optimal first move would be? Is it random (from a selection of openings) or deterministic?

Great review.

--I really caught the excitement you felt while reading it... And you left out a lot of really good juicy bits that make me want to check the book out.

--Darn you, sir! Darn you like a sock!!

Did they mention Deep Blue's Vivisection...?

A friend of mine (we've been shootin' buddies since the BBS days) worked on the hardware team for Deep Blue. He told me the machine was immediately turned into an organ donor to meet customer commitments for that quarter's revenues... Typical of the Big Blue he and I worked for.

Re:Rushing home !?!

Actually it can be...
I have been to a number of matches, alwais fun live and on TV.

And yes not seeing it live takes away some of the charm.....

Re:Deep Blue != AI

I would disagree. I forget who first said it but one of my favorite quotes is "When computers become intelligent it won't be artificial.".

I think systems like Deep Blue are types of AI, because all of their intelligence is artificial, it's all programmed. When a computer can teach its self to play chess, and win, that will be intelligence.

Re:Deep Blue != AI

Well, that depends on how Deep Blue worked. If it was an expert system, then you are right. If it was a rules based system, that's a different story. A rules based system would have to play several games and develop strategies for winning based on the outcomes of those games. That seems a little intelligent to me.

Re:Wow...

You know in Asia thousands of people sit and watch other peoples games of Starcraft...

Re:Wow...

Rushing home? To hear the end of a chess game? Holy lord is that pathetic.

Uh, this is "slashdot", not AOL. Wrong turn, Bud?