Deep blue, a champion at chess

As the Turing test I talked about in my article "Genesis", how good you are at playing chess is also considered as a measure of how intelligent a machine is. Mostly because it used to be a measure of how intelligent a man was. Moreover chess is a simple game with well-defined rules so it is easy to make a computer play chess. But it is much more complex to teach a computer how to win (i.e. implement a strategy) at chess and especially against worldwide chess champion.

Deep Blue was a project at IBM that started in 1989 with Feng-hsiung Hsu and Murray Campbell. It was based on their previous work on a chess-playing machine called ChipTest. Deep Blue became their new project to build a computer able to beat any human at chess. Deep blue was a supercomputer at that time with a computing power of 11.38 GFLOPS. Thanks to this computing power, Deep Blue was able to explore up to 200 million possible chess positions per second.

Here, machine learning had been used so that Deep Blue could learn from 700,000 grandmaster games. This is a technique, which is nowadays well-known and broadly used by scientists, especially with the advent of datamining to uncover patterns and hidden relationships in large databases. Machine learning enabled Deep Blue to learn abstract notions from games which were quantified by parameters as how important is a safe king position compared to a space advantage in the center.

The first match of six games between the reigning world champion Gary Kasparov and Deep Blue occurred on February 10, 1996.Though Deep blue won the first game, Kasparov won the three following games and then tied the two others. It was a loss for Deep blue and yet it had became the first machine to ever win against a reigning world champion. After some improvements, a rematch took place in May, 1997. Deep Blue became the first machine to win a match against a reigning world champion with a final score in the six-game rematch of 3.5–2.5 (wins count 1 point, draws count 0.5 point)

After the loss, Kasparov said that he sometimes saw deep intelligence and creativity in the machine's moves, a sign that Deep Blue was a success, an intelligent machine had been created. The project ended after this win but inspired other IBM projects, as we will see with Watson in the next article.