IBM's Deep Blue Accepts Challenge to Compete in Ultimate Chess Match with
Human Champ Kasparov

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y., May 30 . . . . IBM has accepted an invitation from
the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for its Deep Blue
computer-chess system to participate in a six-game, full-length,
regulation match with world chess champion Garry Kasparov. The match will
take place next February in Philadelphia, as a featured event of the ACM
50th Anniversary Celebration.

The opportunity arranged by the ACM represents for IBM computer scientists
the culmination of their efforts to de- sign and assemble a computer
hardware and software system endowed with the ability to compete in
full-length, regu- lation chess at the level of the human world champion.
In preparing for that ultimate confrontation with Kasparov, Deep Blue will
this year be challenging several chess grandmasters from different parts
of the world. These com- petitions will test Deep Blue during its
iterative progress from today's prototype form.

The Deep Blue system is a scalable, parallel computing system with hundreds
of special accelerator chips custom de- signed by the computer-chess group
and attached to a power- ful IBM host computer. By February, Deep Blue
will run more than 100 times faster than today's existing system, Deep
Blue Prototype, allowing it to analyze nearly one-billion chess positions
per second.

The IBM Deep Blue computer-chess project began in late 1989 when the Deep
Thought team from Carnegie Mellon Univer- sity joined IBM Research. At IBM
they worked on upgrading the system, the team's first world champion. The
result of their efforts, now called Deep Blue Prototype, was 10 times
faster than its predecessor. Among its most recent achieve- ments was its
victory last June in becoming the Interna- tional Computer Chess
Champion.

Experience with Deep Blue Prototype has been invaluable in the design of
what will be the fully implemented Deep Blue. Even a loss along the way,
such as at the 8th World Computer Chess Championship just completed in
Hong Kong, provides the computer scientists with knowledge that is go- ing
directly into the development of the vastly more power- ful full system.

IBM Research has been involved in parallel processing for 15 years. The
computer-chess project is a basic re- search effort in that area of
computer science and is de- voted to increasing the company's overall
knowledge of the computational capabilities of scalable, parallel
computing systems.

Based at the IBM Research Division's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in
Yorktown Heights, New York, the computer- chess team consists of computer
scientists Feng-Hsiung Hsu, Murray S. Campbell, and Arthur J. Hoane, Jr.,
and is managed by Chung-Jen Tan.

IBM does research at the Thomas J. Watson Research Cen- ter in Yorktown
Heights, New York; the Almaden Research Cen- ter in San Jose, California;
the Zurich Research Center in Rueschlikon, Switzerland; the Tokyo Research
Laboratory in Yamato, Japan; the Haifa Research Laboratory in Haifa,
Israel; the China Research Laboratory in Beijing, China, scheduled to open
in mid-1995; and the recently announced Austin Research Laboratory in
Austin, Texas.

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