Deep Blue
In plain wordsIBM's chess computer that beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, the first time a machine defeated a reigning world champion in a match under standard tournament conditions.
A chess-playing supercomputer built by IBM that defeated the world champion Garry Kasparov 3½–2½ in a six-game match in New York in May 1997. Deep Blue relied on search, not learning: a 30-node IBM RS/6000 SP computer with 480 custom chess chips examined about 200 million positions per second using minimaxminimax, n.: A way for a game-playing program to choose moves by assuming the opponent will always make their best reply, and picking the move whose worst-case outcome is best. search with alpha–beta pruning and selective extensions, guided by a hand-tuned evaluation function with thousands of parameters, an opening book prepared with grandmasters and endgame databases. In their first match, in Philadelphia in February 1996, Kasparov won 4–2, though Deep Blue took the opening game — no computer had previously beaten a sitting world champion in a game played at classical time controls. The 1997 victory became a cultural landmark for AI even though its methods had little to do with general intelligence.
Deep Blue played world-class chess without learning anything from its games.
Origin
Grew out of ChipTest (1985) and Deep Thought (1988), chess machines built by Feng-hsiung Hsu, Murray Campbell and others at Carnegie Mellon University; the team joined IBM Research in 1989. The name joins Deep Thought, the computer in Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with IBM's nickname, Big Blue.
Usage note
Kasparov suggested that humans had intervened during the 1997 match; IBM denied it, declined a rematch and retired the machine. Within a decade, chess programs running on ordinary PCs could beat world champions.
Related
- game treegame tree, n.: A branching diagram of every way a game could unfold: each point is a position, each branch a possible move, and the tips of the branches are wins, losses or draws.
- minimaxminimax, n.: A way for a game-playing program to choose moves by assuming the opponent will always make their best reply, and picking the move whose worst-case outcome is best.
- AlphaZeroAlphaZero, prop. n.: A 2017 DeepMind program that taught itself chess, shogi and Go from nothing but the rules by playing against itself, and within hours of training beat the strongest existing programs.
- IBM WatsonIBM Watson, prop. n.: An IBM question-answering computer that beat two champions of the US quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011. IBM then sold business AI products under the Watson name, many of which disappointed.
- AlphaGoAlphaGo, prop. n.: A DeepMind program that in 2016 beat Lee Sedol, one of the world's best players of the board game Go, a decade or more before many experts expected a computer to manage it.
- AI effectAI effect, n.: The habit of deciding that once a computer can do something — play chess, recognize speech, translate — it no longer counts as real intelligence, so the label keeps moving on to tasks machines cannot manage yet.
- Deep Blue (malaise)Deep Blue (malaise), n.: A feeling of gloom and dread among programmers as AI tools become able to do much of the work that once gave their jobs meaning.
Sources
- Campbell, M., Hoane, A. J. & Hsu, F.-h. (2002). Deep Blue. Artificial Intelligence 134(1–2), 57–83.
Mentioned in
AlphaGoAlphaGo, prop. n.: A DeepMind program that in 2016 beat Lee Sedol, one of the world's best players of the board game Go, a decade or more before many experts expected a computer to manage it., AI effectAI effect, n.: The habit of deciding that once a computer can do something — play chess, recognize speech, translate — it no longer counts as real intelligence, so the label keeps moving on to tasks machines cannot manage yet., AlphaZeroAlphaZero, prop. n.: A 2017 DeepMind program that taught itself chess, shogi and Go from nothing but the rules by playing against itself, and within hours of training beat the strongest existing programs., Garry KasparovGarry Kasparov, prop. n.: A Russian chess world champion whose 1997 loss to IBM's Deep Blue computer became the symbol of machines overtaking people, and who later championed humans and computers working together., IBM WatsonIBM Watson, prop. n.: An IBM question-answering computer that beat two champions of the US quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011. IBM then sold business AI products under the Watson name, many of which disappointed., minimaxminimax, n.: A way for a game-playing program to choose moves by assuming the opponent will always make their best reply, and picking the move whose worst-case outcome is best., narrow AInarrow AI, n.: AI built to do one specific job, or a small set of related jobs, such as playing chess or spotting spam, without being able to turn its skill to unrelated problems., alpha–beta pruningalpha–beta pruning, n.: A shortcut for game programs: tracking the best result each side is already sure of, it ignores lines of play that could only do worse, and when promising moves come first it searches about twice as deep., ChinookChinook, prop. n.: A checkers program from the University of Alberta that in 1994 became the first program crowned world champion in a contest against people, and in 2007 proved that perfect checkers always ends in a draw., Deep Blue (malaise)Deep Blue (malaise), n.: A feeling of gloom and dread among programmers as AI tools become able to do much of the work that once gave their jobs meaning., Deep ThoughtDeep Thought, prop. n.: The giant computer in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that thinks for 7.5 million years and answers the meaning of life with '42'; also an early chess computer named after it., IBM ResearchIBM Research, prop. n.: The research division of the computer company IBM, behind landmark AI systems such as the chess champion Deep Blue and the quiz-show winner Watson., Mechanical TurkMechanical Turk, prop. n.: A famous fake chess-playing machine from 1770: a robed figure that seemed to play chess by itself but hid a human player inside. Its name now stands for 'AI' that is really people working behind the scenes.