Deep Blue (chess Computer) - Origins

Origins

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 autumn 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.

In 1995 "Deep Blue prototype" (actually Deep Thought II, renamed for PR reasons) played in the 8th World Computer Chess Championship. Deep Blue prototype played the computer program Wchess to a draw while Wchess was running on a personal computer. In round 5 Deep Blue prototype had the white pieces and lost to the computer program Fritz 3 in 39 moves while Fritz was running on an Intel Pentium 90Mhz personal computer. In the end of the championship Deep Blue prototype was tied for second place with the computer program Junior while Junior was running on a personal computer.

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