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Subject: Re: I just finished "Behind Deep Blue" book: short comment

Author: Tom Likens

Date: 05:59:19 10/08/02

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If you enjoyed Hsu's book you ought to pick up Jonathan Schaeffer's book
"One Jump Ahead: Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers".  Even,
though it is not about chess it is a fascinating story about a game closely
related.

Jonathan has made a number of significant contributions to the field of
computer chess and his program chess program Phoenix was quite strong
in its day.  His checkers program Chinook, eventually toppled Marion Tinsley
for the world championship.  Before his death Tinsley dominated checkers
in a way that Fischer or Kasparov can only dream about, so Chinook's
accomplishment was unprecedented.

It's a good read that I finished in a long weekend.

regards,
--tom

On October 08, 2002 at 01:02:22, Jouni Uski wrote:

>At first look the book seems to be a big disappointment: no circuit diagrams,
>no game logs, no formulas, not even game scores (except appendix). But still
>it was very interesting reading! Finally You get inside look what really
>happened in Chiptest/Deep Though/Deep Blue development between 1985 and 1997.
>
>E.g. one thing I haven't previously heard is conflict with Hitech project at
>Carnegie Mellon university: in Deep Though there was even some code direct from
>Hitech (but without Hsu's knowledge) - later it was totally removed.
>Also interesting is read, that e.p. move has totally taken almost half of year
>of Hsu's time to fix - he don't like that move...
>The famous 10-0 against best commercial programs by ONE SLOWED DOWN Deep Blue
>chip is explained as well (without games) - they used in 1997 match 480 of them.
>
>And all he gets after 12 years of very hard work in New York match is ruining
>from Kasparov and as after game 5 "the crowd booed us". :-(
>
>Finally in the end of book is also comment about this year Kramnik match. This
>is direct quote: "Wladimir should win the match easily".
>
>Jouni



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