But something more significant than commodity hardware scaling is going on here -Type B chess programs are finally emerging: Despite its vastly inferior brute force, the Deep Blitz machine could already be a match for Deep Blue because of improvements in chess software. Or at least it would have in January 2006 when that article was written. This fascinating ExtremeTech article on building desktop chess computers indicates it would take 24 dual, dual-core 2.2 GHz Opteron machines to match Deep Blue. You could certainly string together a bunch of these fast commodity desktops and build your way up to Deep Blue numbers. The dual and quad-core CPUs on the Fritz Chess benchmark results page almost exactly double the results of single-core CPUs of the same speed. Of course, Deep Blue was built using large arrays of custom hardware designed for the sole purpose of playing chess, so it's a little unfair to directly compare it to a general-purpose, commodity CPU.Ĭhess is an inherently parallelizable problem. The fastest desktop PCs are more than 15 years behind Deep Blue in computer chess. The figure is actually expressed as 4452 kilonodes per second (kN/s), a common unit of measurement for chess engines.Ĥ.45 million chess positions per second sounds impressive, until you compare that with the Deep Blue timeline: Year According to the Fritz Chess Benchmark, my current home PC is capable of evaluating approximately 4.45 million chess positions per second. I recently built myself a new PC based on the latest Intel Core 2 Duo chip. The most famous Type A chess computer is probably IBM's Deep Blue, which went through a number of incarnations before it defeated a reigning world chess champion in 1997. That's why the history of computer chess is dominated by Type A programs. Only good positions are examined.Īs it turns out, computers have a hard time with the concept of "good". There are two general strategies available to computer chess programs: Chess remains the most visible and public benchmark of the relentless increase in computer speed over the last 50 years. Despite my total lack of interest in chess as a game, computer chess has a special significance in the field of computer science. In a sensational final scene, what once seemed like a knowingly silly spin on Asimov's I, Robot modulates into something entirely more sinister.I recently visited the Computer History Museum in nearby San Jose, which has a new exhibit on the history of computer chess. Portions of the film begin to loop, lenses stretch out in all directions, and the film's human and mechanical characters become almost indistinct. Papageorge)'.īut as the convention's eagerly anticipated climax – a chess battle 'twixt man and computer – draws near, Bujalski himself appears to do battle with the machine world, namely the cameras and edit suites of Computer Chess's creation. When the convention's resident wild card, a hot-headed programmer by the name of Michael Papageorge, interrupts a press conference with a sudden confrontational outburst, a static grey title card is inserted beneath him, reading simply: 'Controversial Remarks (M. Much of Computer Chess is almost spectacularly banal, undercutting even its brief moments of drama with an unrelenting sobriety. Boxed into a nondescript suburban hotel, each of a dozen programming teams must present their own chess-playing HALs for battle, in what Bujalski doggedly ensures is the most breathtakingly dull competitive arena ever committed to film. Man and machine do battle in Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess, but only in the least dramatic context imaginable: a 1980s tech convention. And at first glance, it can't help but feel like an underwhelming choice. Most of the label's films date back decades, but this week a rare contemporary title is welcomed into the fold. As DVD sales plummet and HMVs the length and breadth of Britain become branches of Sports Direct with stacked boxes of Lonsdale boxer shorts replacing home entertainment products, pretty much the only outfit still treating the nation's digital versatile disc enthusiasts with any measure of respect is Masters Of Cinema, the UK's foremost purveyor of high-end DVD and Blu-ray releases. Spare a thought for the physical media purists as pop culture intensifies its blossoming courtship with online streaming.
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