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Subject: Re: Has anyone kept a record of reported "Techniques" used in DeepBlue?

Author: Tom Kerrigan

Date: 19:43:07 11/14/01

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On November 14, 2001 at 19:52:12, Slater Wold wrote:

>I would venture to say that IBM tested that theory.  "Deep Blue" the micro chess
>program would outsell Chessmaster if it had a strong enough, and pretty enough
>interface.  And I think everyone on this board would probably try to get a copy.
>
>Obviously they felt it either 1.) wasn't worth the work or 2.) realized that
>without a super computer pushing it, it was weak.

They put a lot of hype into DB, and if DB/PC came out and was "only" as good as
the top programs, or marginally weaker, it would have been a disappointment to
some (many?) people.

I expect that IBM is not interested in going into the commercial chess program
business and they want to keep the mystique of DB alive. Notice that whenever
they build a new supercomputer, they declare how many thousands of times faster
than DB it is. (How they get these numbers is beyond me; I assume they're just
cheating and not factoring in the chess ASICs.) They probably think this is more
valuable than the relatively insignificant amount of money they would get from
selling the program commercially.

I believe Hsu bought the rights to the chip design from IBM, and presumably that
includes the evaluation algorithms. It's a shame that he hasn't redone these in
software (or made them publicly available, if he has). It would be nice if he
wrote a paper detailing the thing.

-Tom



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