Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 21:23:34 01/14/00
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On January 14, 2000 at 19:21:09, Dann Corbit wrote: >On January 14, 2000 at 18:58:43, Amir Ban wrote: > >>On January 14, 2000 at 18:42:21, Pete R. wrote: >[snip] >>>This is most likely correct, come to think of it. Kasparov came to the belief >>>that he was playing a whole host of top GMs during the Kasparov vs. The World >>>game, whereas in reality the bulk of analysis for the world team was done by >>>Irina Krush and her trainers, two IMs on the world bulletin boards, and >>>contributions from amateurs using computers. But due to his natural ego I think >>>he is inclined to build up his adversary. So rather than believe that one man >>>can design a chip and create a machine to beat him, it is much more satisfying >>>to believe that it takes the power of one of the world's largest corporations to >>>handle him. >> >>In this case, I would agree with him. > >I have to agree as well. I don't think the DT chip (by itself) could have won. >Therefore, it takes the enormous efforts, resources and talents of IBM to pull >the whole thing off. And while the chip was a burst of glory, without a >super-fast memory bus to relay the data back and forth from the chess >processors, you won't see the massive gains of parallelism that were seen. The >impact of the GM's that helped to tune and the other experts like Campbell was >all part of the effort. I don't know how much the whole thing cost, but I would >guess it was in the millions of dollars. I'm sure that IBM got their money's >worth out of it. But I will never pan IBM for what they did. It was the best >thing ever to happen to chess [IMO-YMMV]. > >The heart of the idea was Hsu's. But without millions of dollars from IBM, I >doubt very much if there would have been any computer match victories over >Kasparov in the 90's. The SP isn't the best machine by far. Hsu could have done far better with a machine based on an SMP alpha platform, rather than the message-passing on the SP architecture. And then there are the Crays of course. I think that most of what was accomplished could have been pulled off by any company with the foresight to recognize the enormous P/R potential of the project. Don't forget that Deep Thought was unbeatable as far as other computers went, losing only a couple of games over a 10 year period. Yet it was put together for almost nothing at a university...
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