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Subject: Campbell: It is a 20 billion move search

Author: K. Burcham

Date: 19:07:05 09/20/05




What does John Wayne have in common with Deep Blue? They are both gone.

kburcham

Does the computer always make the same move when faced with a given position?

Hsu: "There is some randomization by the fact we are doing a parallel search...
Sometime the same position, the same program, the same hardware, everything the
same, start it again, it might behave differently."

Campbell: "Minor changes in initial conditions produce large changes in
outcome."

[MARCY HOLLE, the IBM public relations spokesperson, suggests that the Deep Blue
team explain why Deep Blue made certain moves in its first game against
Kasparov.]

Campbell: "It's hard to explain what it did, because it is a 20 billion move
search, or something like that."

Hsu: "And we can only see... one line of moves."

Tan: "... It's hard to even just record and look at 20 billion board positions.
So the computer just prints out the principal line of its search. The machine is
very accurate [in its analysis of certain situations], because it looks at all
possible moves up to 12 ply and others down further. So when Gary was trying to
checkmate Deep Blue at the end of game one, the computer just saw every move and
was one step ahead of him [and could ignore the threat]... A human player...
would have been scared."

Campbell: "When you're playing against the world champion, and you're not
losing, you might as well play it out."

Tan: "In this match we used a 32-node parallel processor... We have in this
building a 128-node parallel processor. We did not use that one, because it is
very expensive... [We would have] to stop all other research in this building.
That's one thing. Secondly, our goal is just to get to the level where we can
play Gary... We did that. If we really wanted 100-percent certainty that we will
beat him in a match, we would have used 128 or 512[-node] parallel system to get
extra insurance. But we didn't do that. So the technology is here today, in
terms of computational strength."

Campbell: "If we hired ten grandmasters for two years to help us and we got the
biggest machines and spent hundreds of millions of dollars, I think we could
have done it. But what we're learning just as much from what we're doing."

Hoane: "I saw Campbell beat Deep Thought [Deep Blue's predecessor] once, in our
entire career. And I don't need to be beaten by Deep Blue. Any cheap commercial
program can thrash me."




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