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Subject: Re: Wanted: Deep Blue vs. today's top programs recap

Author: David Blackman

Date: 05:19:21 08/26/01

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Keep in mind there was a series of machines. ChipTest -> Deep Thought -> Deep
Thought 2 -> Deep Blue -> Deeper Blue. They were similar in some ways, very
different in others. It was Deeper Blue that finally beat Kasparov.

Deeper Blue was significantly faster than Fritz running on any platform they are
likely to have this year. Deeper Blue also had a significantly more complex
evaluation function. Whether the eval in Deeper Blue was actually better is a
difficult question, but certainly it evaluated more positional things for most
positions.

The quality of the search algorithms is another question. Deeper Blue's search
is not very well understood by anyone who has chosen to talk about it. It was
probably a lot better than Fritz at finding long forceing lines. It is quite
possible that it wasn't as good as Fritz at finding lines that are not obviously
forcing but still important. But that is not completely clear. Fritz probably
still makes use of null-move pruning, which improves depth, but occasionally
makes you miss important stuff. Deeper Blue probably didn't use null-move, at
least not in the parts of the search near the root.

Opening preparation is another question. Both would be quite good in this
respect, i think, but i don't know how much special preparation Fritz will do
for Kramnik. It will have to do quite a lot to be as well prepared as Deeper
Blue was for Kasparov, but then opening preparation might not be quite as
important against Kramnik.

Overall, i think Deeper Blue was probably stronger than any Fritz you will see
this year. But the gap is narrowing and the uncertainty is getting greater every
year.



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