En Passant Cup 2012/13

Deep Blue

In 1985 a group of researchers led by graduate Feng-hsiung Hsu at Carmegie Mellon University built a chess playing computer known as ChipTest. This was based upon a proprietary VLSI chip controlled by a Sun workstation and capable of searching 50,000 moves per second. It was later enhanced to become 10 times more powerful and won the North American Computer Chess Championship in 1987.This same team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon went on develop Deep Thought based upon IBM technology. This machine won the North American Computer Chess Championship in 1988 and the World Computer Chess Championship in 1989 achieving an ELO rating of 2551. The Carnegie Mellon team were recruited by IBM in 1989, the same year that saw Deep Thought lose both encounters of a two game match to World Champion Gary Kasparov. By 1994 Deep Thought had been upgraded and achieved a 2600 rating; this manifestation was capable of examining 500 million positions per move. Deep Blue was the successor of Deep Thought and first appeared in 1995. In February 1996 this machine become the first to win a game against a reigning World Champion during another match with Kasparov but the World Champion still who won the encounter 4-2 (+3, =2, -1). Deep Blue was then radically overhauled and upgraded to utilise massively parallel processors and probably more importantly, incorporate an Openings Library. In a controversial return match in May 1997 Deep Blue finally defeated Kasparov 3.5-2.5 (+2, =3, -1).After the match Deep Blue was retired and now resides in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC