Author: Keith Evans
Date: 10:23:57 04/03/02
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On April 03, 2002 at 11:44:45, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On April 03, 2002 at 04:26:37, Tom Kerrigan wrote: > > >> >>>Deep Thought's evaluation was based directly on Belle's... Deep Thought >>>was simply a "belle on a single chip" where belle was a huge batch of FPGA's >> Actually I don't think that this is quite correct. Deep Thought was not Belle on a chip - at least not according to Hsu's thesis. Deep Thought was the ChipTest move generator (part of Belle on a chip), plus some flavor of sequencer, plus some programmable logic etcetera to handle the evaluation. As far as I can tell the Deep Thought evaluation described in Hsu's thesis was simpler than the Belle evaluation. I think that you said that ChipTest did some part of the search in a different post, but this is not correct. It was just a move generator. Search was handled by microcode running on an external sequencer. Maybe there were subsequent versions of Deep Thought which integrated more functionality on a chip - but I didn't think that this happened until the era of Deep Blue. Please correct me if I'm wrong. >>I don't think FPGAs had been invented at the time. >> >>-Tom > > >They've been around forever in various forms. Look up Ken's paper on >Belle. Or his paper "An FPGA based move generator for the game of Chess" >or any of several other publications including the second edition of >"Chess skill in man and machine." > >Belle used them in 1980, for certain. I don't know how long they had been >out by then... I think that Belle must have used some form of FPLA or PAL which is a little different than an FPGA. I remember using some of the early Xilinx FPGA parts in the early 1990's are they were quite primitive as that time. (As far as I know: FPLA - programmable AND and OR terms, PAL - programmable AND terms, CPLD - usually multiple PALS plus some programmable routing, FPGA - totally different structure) Here's a quote from Xilinx: "Founded in 1984 and headquartered in San Jose, California, Xilinx invented the field programmable gate array (FPGA) and fulfills more than half of the world demand for these devices today." Regards, Keith
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