Deep Blue

   Deep Blue was a legendary [1]chess playing [2]IBM [3]supercomputer, which
   in 1997 made [4]history by being the first ever [5]computer to beat the
   human world chess champion at the time (Garry Kasparov), marking a moment
   which many consider that at which "computers finally outsmarted humans".
   Since then computers really did continue to surpass humans at chess by
   much greater margins; nowadays a mere cellphone running [6]stockfish can
   easily rape the world chess champion.

   History: it all started around 1985 as a program called ChipTest by some
   Taiwanese guy with unpronounceable name. It went on to win some computer
   chess tournaments and when multiple people were already working on it as a
   part of IBM research, it was renamed to Deep Thought after the computer in
   [7]Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, however it had to be later renamed to
   Deep Blue because the name too much resembled [8]deep throat :D By 1990 it
   has already played the world champion, Kasparov, but lost. In 1996 Deep
   Blue played him again, this time losing the match again but already having
   won a game, showing the potential was there. In May 1997, after upgrade
   both in hardware and software, it finally beat Kasparov with 3 wins, 2
   losses and 1 draw.

   { Lol, according to Wikipedoa it trolled Kasparov in the first game by
   making a completely random move due to a bug once, it scared him because
   he thought it was some deeply calculated threat while it was just some
   completely dumb move. ~drummyfish }

   It's important to see that Deep Blue wasn't really a general chess engine
   like [9]stockfish, it was a single purpose supercomputer, a combination of
   [10]hardware and [11]software engineered from the ground up with the
   single purpose: win the match against Garry Kasparov. It was being fine
   tuned in between the games with assistance of grandmasters. A team of
   experts on computers and chess focused their efforts on this single
   opponent at the specific time controls and match set up, rather than
   trying to make a generally usable chess computer. They studied Kasparov's
   play and made Deep Blue ready for it; they even employed psychological
   tricks -- for example it had preprogrammed instant responses to some
   Kasparov's expected moves, so as to make him more nervous.

   Technical details: Deep Blue was mainly relying on massively parallel
   [12]brute force, i.e. looking many moves ahead and consulting stored
   databases of games; in 1997 it had some 11 [13]GFLOPS. The base computer
   was IBM RS/6000 SP (taking two cabinets) with IBM AIX [14]operating
   system, using 32 [15]PowerPC 200 MHz processors and 480 specialized "chess
   chips". It had evaluation function implemented in hardware. All in all the
   whole system could search hundreds of millions positions per second.
   Non-extended search was performed to a depth of about 12 plies, extended
   search went even over 40 plies deep. It had an opening book with about
   4000 positions and endgame tablebases for up to 6 pieces. It was
   programmed in [16]C. { Sources seems to sometimes give different numbers
   and specs, so not exactly sure about this. ~drummyfish }

See Also

     * [17]stockfish

Links:
1. chess.md
2. ibm.md
3. supercomputer.md
4. history.md
5. computer.md
6. stockfish.md
7. hgttg.md
8. deep_throat.md
9. stockfish.md
10. hw.md
11. sw.md
12. brute_force.md
13. flops.md
14. operating_system.md
15. ppc.md
16. c.md
17. stockfish.md