Author: Keith Ian Price
Date: 17:14:09 05/01/98
Here is part two of the report on Deep Blue. 5. As to the fairness of the matches between Deep Blue and Kasparov, many have brought up the point that IBM was quite secretive about giving out any games to Kasparov. As part of the presentation, Hsu addressed this by pointing out that the chess chips for DB for the first match arrived in January for the February match. DB was assembled for the first time just two weeks before the match, and so they were not likely to give out games played in that period with the match coming up, and the software not fully debugged. The new chess chips for the rematch were made in 6 months and debugged in two months, thus there was almost a half year of time before the second match, which could have afforded them time to play some games and give them to Kasparov. To explain why they did not, Hsu used the "laughingstock" rule, which he said meant that in determining what requests of Kasparov's to accept or reject, they decided that if he requested anything that would make him a "laughingstock" if the tournament were for the world championship, they would deny the request. He stated that no player vying for the world championship would release games in the six months before the championship. They generally go into seclusion, he said, and study new openings, etc., to try out in the match. Therefore, if Kasparov were playing "the number two player in the world, Vishy Anand," and he demanded that Anand give him games played in preparation, he would be a laughingstock. This, then, is why they would not release any games. I must admit that I found this to be the strangest argument he used in his presentation. I told him afterward that I felt that not to have any games at all to study put Kasparov at a distinct disadvantage, since the opening books designed for Deep Blue's rematch were based on Kasparov's games that they had available. He stated that there are many games available from Deep Thought's matches that he could study, and I asked if he seriously thought that studying the game DT lost to Fritz in '95 would really help Kasparov. He was quite adamant, and stated that Anand doesn't play the same way now that he did when he was younger, either. I left it at this point, since I had futher questions, and didn't want to push the point since he obviously felt that their team was being quite fair. To be evenhanded, I must point out that there are apparently not very many games against the full DB, anyway, since most practice games were played by Joel Benjamin against DB, Jr. According to Hsu, most of these training (for DB) games were also not actual games (40/2 tournament style); rather Benjamin would play until he got behind, and then take back moves until he returned to a relatively neutral position, and try different tacks in this manner until he found a weakness, and could get the machine into a lost position. He would then explain the weakness to Hsu, and the others, and they would tweak the evaluation until it wouldn't play the poor line anymore. So most of those games were, in the end, losses, and might have revealed a lot more than a string of regular games. 6. I asked him about whether DB had gone into "Panic mode" during move 35 of Game 2. He said that it apparently had, because it took so much time to play the move, but that he didn't know what was causing it, since he was not allowed to use the terminal during the match for purposes of finding out what was causing it to take so long. He was curious at the time, himself. I asked about Amir Ban's interpretation of the printouts, and he stated that he did not think that Amir knew how to read the outputs. He said that it was ridiculous to think that axb5 had been pondered for less than a second. In the parralel-processing method of Deep Blue that move had been being processed right along with Qb6, but never made it to the top of the list until Qb6 was rejected at the last minute. He said he did not know why it was rejected at the last minute. I asked if there were logs stored to disk as the game was played, and he said there were, but they we somewhat basic, and there was no way to log what all the chess processors were doing during that time. Therefore, he would not be able to tell from the log. He seemed to say that the only way he could have found out what was happening was to use the terminal while the move was going on, and that this was not allowed. 7. I inquired as to when he might publish some papers on the advances in computer chess achieved during his work on DT/DB, since they were moving on to other things. He said he had written an article on DB's chess processor, but perhaps it was published in the wrong place, a chip design journal. He said he had no plans to write papers on such specifics as Evaluation techniques, etc., as with 8000 separate features, individually tunable, in the Eval section of the chess processor, this would require a pretty massive book, and that there were only a handful of people in the world who would be interested. I guess that handful would be you guys. He said he is too busy writing a book on the development of the project to publish anything, and when, after he said he wouldn't know a good place to publish something like that anyway, I suggested JICCA, he said that that would not be a good place. So I wouldn't hold my breath on receiving any startling revelations from that corner. He is more interested in the hardware side of the problem, since that was his chosen field, at least this was my impression. Well, I'm going to upload this part now, before my ISP gets too busy, and I have trouble logging on. I'll try to get the rest tonight, but it may have to wait until tomorrow. kp
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