In the end of the championship Deep Blue prototype was tied for second place with the computer program Junior while Junior was running on a personal computer. In round 5 Deep Blue prototype had the white pieces and lost to the computer program Fritz 3 in 39 moves while Fritz was running on an Intel Pentium 90Mhz personal computer. Deep Blue prototype played the computer program Wchess to a draw while Wchess was running on a personal computer. In 1995 'Deep Blue prototype' (actually Deep Thought II, renamed for PR reasons) played in the 8th World Computer Chess Championship.

After a scaled down version of Deep Blue, Deep Blue Jr., played Grandmaster Joel Benjamin, Hsu and Campbell decided that Benjamin was the expert they were looking for to develop Deep Blue's opening book, and Benjamin was signed by IBM Research to assist with the preparations for Deep Blue's matches against Garry Kasparov. Īfter Deep Thought's 1989 match against Kasparov, IBM held a contest to rename the chess machine and it became 'Deep Blue', a play on IBM's nickname, 'Big Blue'. The team was managed first by Randy Moulic, followed by Chung-Jen (C J) Tan. Jerry Brody, a long-time employee of IBM Research, was recruited for the team in 1990. Anantharaman subsequently left IBM for Wall Street and Arthur Joseph Hoane joined the team to perform programming tasks. Hsu and Campbell joined IBM in autumn 1989, with Anantharaman following later. After their graduation from Carnegie Mellon, Hsu, Thomas Anantharaman, and Murray Campbell from the Deep Thought team were hired by IBM Research to continue their quest to build a chess machine that could defeat the world champion. So despite beating us at chess, it seems we are benefitting in many other ways from the ever-increasing calculating speed of our silicon friends.The project was started as ChipTest at Carnegie Mellon University by Feng-hsiung Hsu, followed by its successor, Deep Thought. Other versions of the supercomputer are modelling the flight patterns of birds to predict the spread of bird flu pandemics. Was this proof that computers would take over the world and subjugate their human creators? Fortunately, over a decade later, this has yet to happen!Īfter the match, IBM packed away Deep Blue (pictured) in it's metaphorical box and it never played chess again.īut IBM didn't stop making supercomputers, and the latest incarnation of the 'Blue' series - Blue Ice - is now turning it's gigantic calculating power to a practical use - saving the planet.īased at the Centre For Climate Research in Swansea University in Wales, Blue Ice is putting it's mind-boggling powers of calculation - it can make 2 trillion calculations per second - to work on predicting the effects of climate change on our planet. The match was billed in some quarters as humanity's last stand against the machines. In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue computer won a 6-game match against the legendary Garry Kasparov and made headlines around the world.

Deep blue chess computer specs