I ran the computers at the 1997 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence when they held their first Human/Machine Exhibition matches in a variety of games. Historically, computer Go programs have been horrible.
CAN I PLAY AGEINSTT THE DEEP BLUE CHESS PC
A high-end desktop PC is plenty of hardware for performance.
CAN I PLAY AGEINSTT THE DEEP BLUE CHESS SOFTWARE
Tl dr: The strength of chess programs these days is mostly about software optimizations. I don't know of anybody experimenting with anything fancier than many GB of ordinary RAM. For this reason, a ton of fast memory is really helpful. But it is certainly the case that modern software running on PCs is stronger than Deep Blue, and almost certainly stronger than the strongest humans playing today.Īnother optimization to negamax search that is extremely important involves maintaining a "transposition table": basically a giant list of positions and their calculated scores. We don't really know how much different Deep Blue's performance was than a standard PC, because it was dismantled almost immediately after the Kasparov match and the parts distributed to various places. The tradeoff with alpha-beta meant that the parallelism didn't help as much as you'd expect. Deep Blue was such a computer it was heavily parallel and had special hardware to quickly evaluate the score of a position when the computer stopped looking ahead. Thus, it is hard to make a parallel chess computer do anything useful. There's an important software optimization here known as "alpha-beta pruning" which does two things: makes it much, much faster to do this search (exponentially faster), and requires that all the moves be evaluated sequentially rather than in parallel. It looks like at this point I'm ahead by 1.5 pawns." It does that over and over until it's tried all the 3-ply positions (looking three moves ahead), then tries again with all the 4-ply positions and so forth until it runs out of time. The computer says "if I do this, then you'll do this, then I'll do this, then.naw, I'm tired of it. Carl Sagan, CosmosĪ chess computer works by looking ahead at all possible games played out to increasing depth, choosing the move that leads to the best-looking result with best play by opponent. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.