![]() Although Deep Blue did beat Kasparov in 1997, there's ample evidence that Kasparov was the better player and he psyched himself out during the match. I think this is a dubious claim, particularly since it's not based on any actual data from computer versus human games. Now that computers are clearly better than humans at chess, the question arises, can computers attempt to guess the strength of a game's play based on the moves in that game? And can we use that method to evaluate 'classic' games? Do we really want to? Zappa's lone draw was ironically against the program which lost every other game in the entire tournament. Dark horses obliterating the field is a common thing in AI. Some humorous notes: Zappa and Fruit were both written by lone grad students in under two years. Of course, you'll soon be able to buy the commercial version of Zappa and have it play against itself, resulting in a string of games most of which are better than any game ever played between two humans. Fruit came in a clear second, so this is the only tournament game we have between the two strongest chess players ever created. In this most recent world computer tournament, Zappa scored an astounding 10.5 out of 11, a better performance than any human has ever had in a human world championship, and against a stronger field than any human world champion has ever faced. ![]() Bram Cohen thinks the derived ratings from computer play are enough to crown the computer chess programs champs over human grandmasters, too: What's the best tournament chess game of all time? If by 'best' one means 'best played' then I'm afraid the answer is Zappa vs. The latest computer chess ratings are determined solely by computer vs. It seems likely that Deep Fritz, which is more efficient at filtering out weak moves, is a far more 'intelligent' chess program compared with Deep Blue's software. Obviously, Kasparov did not evaluate 200 million chess positions per second when he defeated Deep Blue in game 1 of the 1997 match, thus the 200 million positions per second number is not a requirement to play chess at the word championship level. In a match between Deep Blue and the Deep Blitz machine running Deep Fritz or Deep Shredder, it seems unclear which machine would win. The data suggest that Deep Blue spent a lot of time evaluating bad moves but overcame this weakness through brute force. Deep Fritz is able to evaluate lines of play to a similar depth because it successfully narrows its search only to the strongest lines of play. But something more significant than commodity hardware scaling is going on here -Type B chess programs are finally emerging: Despite its vastly inferior brute force, the Deep Blitz machine could already be a match for Deep Blue because of improvements in chess software. Or at least it would have in January 2006 when that article was written. This fascinating ExtremeTech article on building desktop chess computers indicates it would take 24 dual, dual-core 2.2 GHz Opteron machines to match Deep Blue. You could certainly string together a bunch of these fast commodity desktops and build your way up to Deep Blue numbers. ![]() The dual and quad-core CPUs on the Fritz Chess benchmark results page almost exactly double the results of single-core CPUs of the same speed. Of course, Deep Blue was built using large arrays of custom hardware designed for the sole purpose of playing chess, so it's a little unfair to directly compare it to a general-purpose, commodity CPU.Ĭhess is an inherently parallelizable problem. The fastest desktop PCs are more than 15 years behind Deep Blue in computer chess. The figure is actually expressed as 4452 kilonodes per second (kN/s), a common unit of measurement for chess engines.Ĥ.45 million chess positions per second sounds impressive, until you compare that with the Deep Blue timeline: Year According to the Fritz Chess Benchmark, my current home PC is capable of evaluating approximately 4.45 million chess positions per second. I recently built myself a new PC based on the latest Intel Core 2 Duo chip. The most famous Type A chess computer is probably IBM's Deep Blue, which went through a number of incarnations before it defeated a reigning world chess champion in 1997. That's why the history of computer chess is dominated by Type A programs. Only good positions are examined.Īs it turns out, computers have a hard time with the concept of "good". There are two general strategies available to computer chess programs: Chess remains the most visible and public benchmark of the relentless increase in computer speed over the last 50 years. Despite my total lack of interest in chess as a game, computer chess has a special significance in the field of computer science. I recently visited the Computer History Museum in nearby San Jose, which has a new exhibit on the history of computer chess.
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