Intelligent Systems Report € March € 1996 € Volume 13 € No. 3

Kasparov defeats Deep Blue

Probably the best-known application of artificial intelligence has nothing to do with industry, medicine, finance, or the military -- it's the computer chess programs that do battle with human chess grandmasters. Last month in Philadelphia, the once-unthinkable occurred: The IBM computer Deep Blue actually defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in regulation match play -- the first time that had ever happened.

True, Kasparov later rebounded in the six-match competition, which was sponsored by the Association for Computing (ACM), winning three times and playing to a draw twice. Nevertheless, Deep Blue's opening-match win brought more attention to AI research and parallel processing than any other intelligent system or activity has accomplished since the Reagan "Star Wars" days.

Deep Blue, a descendant of the earlier Deep Thought computer chess program that Kasparov summarily defeated in 1989, is an RS/6000 supercomputer with specialized chess processing chips and software capable of 50 billion calculations per move. The system is a 32-node parallel processing high performance computer with eight specialized chess processor chips attached to each node, enabling it to apply brute force processing power to analyze many iterations of possible chess moves. There are more than one million lines of programming code in the C programming language which were used to create the specialized software used in conjunction with the hardware. Deep Blue was developed by researchers at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center (Yorktown Heights, N.Y.).

Despite its incredible speed, Deep Blue proved to be only second-best in the human/machine competition. After his opening match defeat, Kasparov developed a strategy for attacking the computer. He discovered that by moving for safe positions rather than direct attacks, he could lull the machine into opening its defense. "If you threaten, the machine will counterattack," he said. "But if there is no threat, the machine will go about its business and eventually give you an opportunity."

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