Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 17:38:08 09/23/98
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On September 23, 1998 at 17:39:22, Lyle D. Brooks wrote: >On September 20, 1998 at 17:29:24, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>On September 20, 1998 at 14:22:02, John Coffey wrote: >> >>>Is Deep Blue gone forever, or is it going to play chess again/ >>> >>>John Coffey >> >> >>Unknown. The hardware chips are on a shelf somewhere. The software >>is still around. Whether it will all be reassembled to play chess again >>is anybody's guess. Probably when IBM decides that bring the monster out >>again makes financial sense... >I read somewhere that the mainframe was going to be sold to forecast weather. Note that there are two parts of Deep Blue.... the IBM SP machine, which is something they sell every day, and then chess processors which is the hardware Hsu and group designed/built. I suspect the "Deep Blue" SP-2 machine was sold right after the event. And if they wanted, they could pull another one off the manufacturing floor and have it running in a couple of hours. When we played in tournaments with Cray Blitz, the machines we used were on the manufacturing floor, most of the time, in "hardware burn-in" bays where they run the machines for a few weeks to burn them in for reliability reasons. After a tournament, "Cray Blitz" was generally shipped out within a week to the customer that had ordered that specific machine. So the "Deep Blue" being "sold" is not really anything permanent, because the chess processors are still up at Watson, and can be plugged into another SP in short order... *if* they ever decide to roll it back out for another match somewhere... So it isn't "gone" at all... just "mothballed" until the next time it is needed.
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