Deep Blue

Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

Monty Newborn

Deep Blue

An Artificial Intelligence Milestone

Foreword by Charles E. Lieserson

With 94 Figures

, Springer

Monty Newbom School of Computer Science McGiII University Montreal, Quebec H3A 2A 7 Canada newbom@cs.mcgill.ca

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Newborn, Monroe.

Deep Blue ; an artificial intelligence milestone / Monty Newborn. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4684-9568-3 1. Computer Chess. 2. Deep Blue (Computer) 1. Title.

GV1449.3 .N47 2002 794.1'72-dc21 2002070741

Printed on acid-free paper.

ISBN 978-1-4684-9568-3 ISBN 978-0-387-21790-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-21790-1

© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media New York Originally published by Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. in 2003 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 2003 AII rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of infonnation storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar metho-dology now known Of hereafter deve10ped is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even il' they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights.

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Foreword

A s a competitor of the Deep Blue team, I had mixed emotions as I watched their chess-playing machine defeat World Chess Cham­pion Garry Kasparov during their 1997 Rematch. On the one hand,

it meant that our MIT program, *Socrates, would not be the first program to defeat a human World Chess Champion. On the other hand, I felt great admiration for the monumental engineering accomplishment that Deep Blue's victory represented, and proud for the small part that my own team had played in advancing computer-chess research. After over 50 years of concerted effort to produce a chess-playing machine capable of beating the best human, Deep Blue finally attained the goal that so many computer scientists had sought.

In this entertaining and informative book, Monty Newborn chronicles the story of Deep Blue, from its origins as Chiptest at Carnegie Mellon University to its winning the Rematch as a top IBM research project. You do not have to be a chess player or a computer scientist to enjoy this marvelous tale of man and machine. Monty paints the characters of this drama in vivid colors, from the technical geniuses CB Hsu, Murray Camp­bell, and Thomas Anantharaman to the visionary manager CJ Tan. As only an insider can, Monty recreates the excitement of the event, including the IBM marketing hype and the marvelous compendium of editorial cartoons.

When my Supercomputing Technologies research group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science produced its first chess-playing program, Deep Thought was already a legend. My group's goal was to explore how modem parallel-processing technology could be leveraged fornonnumerical problems. Computer chess was a perfect vehicle, representing a dynamic and unstructured computation atypical of the static and regular structure of traditional numerical computations. For us, computer chess began as a bit of a lark to gain some P. R. for our work on parallel computation. While the Deep Blue team aimed its sights on Garry Kasparov, we were focused on them, since Deep Thought represented the pinnacle of computer chess at that time.

My research group's first program, StarTech, was written by Bradley Kuszmaul. Running on a 512:;processor Connection Machine CM5 at the University of Illinois, StarTech won 3rd prize in the 1993 ACM International

vi Deep Blue: An Artificial Intelligence Milestone

Computer Chess Championship, not bad for a first outing. At that tourna­ment we met Don Dailey and Larry Kaufman, whose Socrates program won the tournament running on a personal computer. We joined forces to produce the *Socrates parallel program. Don Dailey wrote most of the chess code, and Chris Joerg wrote most of the parallel-processing code in the new "multithreaded" language Cilk which my research group was developing. In our first outing with *Socrates, we finally faced Deep Thought II at the 1994 ACM International Computer Chess Championship. Playing White to Deep Thought's Black, *Socrates succumbed to a brilliant Sicilian Defense in what some commentators at the time called the best chess game ever played between computers.

*Socrates faced Deep Thought II for the second time in the 1995 ICC A World Computer Chess Championship in Hong Kong. This time, running on an 1824-node Intel Paragon at Sandia National Laboratories. Our opening book was much improved but it didn't matter. Playing Black to Deep Thought II's White, *Socrates lost in 51 moves. Fortunately, this loss to Deep Thought II was our only loss in the five rounds of play, which tied uS with the program Fritz4 for 1st prize, which actually beat Deep Thought II in the tournament. Watching via the Internet from my home in Massachu­setts, my elation at our 1st-place tie turned to disappointment as *Socrates lost to Fritz4 in the playoff, giving Fritz4 the crown of World Computer Chess Champion. Our disappointment could not compare to that of the Deep Blue team, however. Poor Deep Thought II lost its bid to regain the World Championship and had to settle for 3rd prize, an inauspicious omen for its upcoming rematch with Garry Kasparov. How quickly things can change in the world of computer chess!

Now, five years later, I cannot look back at the events leading up to the Rematch without nostalgia for the excitement which Monty so accurately portrays in this book. At the same time, I must wonder, was Deep Blue's defeat of Garry Kasparov good or bad for computer chess? Finding spon­sors for computer-chess tournaments, always challenging, has become near impossible. My own computer-chess team at MIT has been disbanded. Yet, despite widespread sentiment to the contrary, research on computer chess is far from finished, even though a computer has beat a World Champion. Should we blame Deep Blue for the current loss of interest in a rich area of research?

I believe that we must view computer-chess research in its historical context. Computer chess taught the world much, from efficient algorithms for heuristic search to languages for programming parallel processors. Moreover, research in other areas of computer game playing, such as Go, continues to intrigue researchers. If we can look towards an analogy, Charles Lindbergh's solo across the Atlantic in 1927 not only captured the

Foreword vii

imagination of the 1927 public, it heralded numerous other aviation feats, including the 1969 Apollo landing on the moon. So, too, Deep Blue's defeat of Garry Kasparov does not signal the end of a line of research; rather, it portends many future accomplishments in the engineering of artificially intelligent systems. In this respect, Monty's book offers a bold tribute to a historic milestone which future researchers will doubtless look back on for inspiration.

Charles E. Lieserson Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2002

Preface

I n 1989 IBM took on a scientific project that would eventually hold the world spellbound. Three Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. graduates, Feng-Hsiung Hsu, Murray Campbell, and Thomas Anantharaman,

were recruited to continue the work they had begun as students. The objective: to create a chess-playing computer that would outplay the best human on planet Earth.

Eight years later, two of the original three, Hsu and Campbell, together now with a large team of other IBM researchers, made it into the annals of history. Their creation, Deep Blue, defeated World Champion Garry Kaspa­rov in a six-game match in New York in early May of 1997. IBM celebrated, the chess grandmasters of the world went into a state of shock, and the average person on the street wondered what it was all about.

For the Deep Blue team and for IBM, the match was a monumental triumph, ranking as one of the great technological achievements of the 20th century. It can be compared with Orville Wright's first flight in 1906 and with NASA's moon landing in 1969. In addition, for IBM, the match was possibly the single greatest public relations event in the company's century­long history. The match was also the subject of the most successful Internet broadcast to that time. Over the next several years, sales of IBM supercomputers mushroomed.

The following pages tell the story of this historic showdown between Deep Blue and Kasparov, exploring the years of work leading up to and surrounding their final battles. It is a story of how a super-talented team of scientists and engineers designed their dream. It is about how one of America's mightiest corporations nurtured the team, even though impor­tant voices inside were concerned with each setback. It is a story filled with drama and surprises, disappointments, and incredible successes. Deep Blue's success raises many questions about our future relationship with this new exciting tool, the digital computer, now a half-century old, and des­tined to be our companion for centuries to come.

My own involvement in the world of computers and chess dates back many years. Chess, of course, came first, since there were no computers when, as a child, I was taught to play chess by my parents. My main opponent was my brother, with whom I played countless games.

x Deep Blue: An Artificial Intelligence Milestone

My interest continued through university studies and included participa­tion on The Ohio State University chess team in the 1960s. I participated in a number of tournaments during those years, including one in Michigan that featured Bobby Fischer and that I will never forget. On the eve of the final round of the competition, I watched Fischer, who was then in his early 20s, gamble on one speed chess game after another with a Chicago chess master. Fischer was winning even though spotting his opponent various pieces. I retired around 11:00 p.m. only to find the two still battling one another the following morning. The final round started, if I recall correctly, at 10:00 a.m. Fischer, who was paired with Arthur Bisguier, one of the top several players in the United States, fell into a deep sleep at the board when the game began. With his clock ticking and the audience silently watching, Fischer slept soundly for some time, possibly as long as an hour! When he awoke, he quickly polished off Bisguier. It was an amazing performance.

My interest in computers began in the early 1960safter I graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. I went to work at Douglas Aircraft in Los Angeles and was involved in maintaining a large computer that used vacuum tubes for carrying out logical operations and magnetic cores for storing information. During my subsequent graduate studies at The Ohio State University, I became increasingly interested in logic circuits and at a more abstract level, automata theory. Upon complet­ing my Ph.D. studies, I joined Columbia University's Department of Elec­trical Engineering, and my interest in automata theory continued.

In 1970 the Association for Computing (then called the Association for Computing Machinery) approached Kenneth King, who was director of Columbia's Computer Center, and me with a request to organize a "Special Events Program" at the Association's annual conference at the New York Hilton Hotel. It was the perfect opportunity to combine my interest in computers and chess: to organize the first major competition between computers that played chess. It was the beginning of a long experiment. A program from Northwestern University called Chess 3.0 won the tourna­ment. The success of the first event led to annual competitions at ACM conferences until 1997 when Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov. Working together with Ben Mittman, who was director of Northwestern University's Computer Center, and with British International Master David Levy, I was involved in the organization of one tournament after another.

In 1977 the International Computer Chess Association was formed. Mittman served as the first president. I replaced him three years later, and Levy replaced me three years after that. We organized world champion­ships every three years and world microcomputer championships even more often. I founded the ACM Computer Chess Committee several years later with the support of the ACM's then-president Tony Ralston. I served

Preface xi

as head of that committee from its inception through the two Deep Blue versus Kasparov matches.

In 1972 Columbia University student George Arnold and I developed a chess program of our own called Ostrich. Ostrich competed in major competitions around the world until the late 1980s. In 1974 it narrowly missed tying for first place at the First World Computer Chess Champion­ship. It went into the final round of that event with a 2-1 score and was paired with the Soviet program Kaissa. It foxed Kaissa out of material in the middle game and subsequently found itself in a position where it could force checkmate on its opponent. The mate, however, was one move too deep for the program to see. It played incorrectly and eventually lost the game, leaving Kaissa as the first world computer chess champion. Ostrich managed a draw with Belle during the 1980s. In 1986 Ostrich defeated a barely debugged version of the future Deep Blue in its tournament debut!

From its very first competition, I have followed the progress of what eventually became Deep Blue. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to observe both the Deep Blue team and Kasparov from up close as they prepared for and participated in their 1996 and 1997 matches. In my capacity as chairman of the ACM Computer Chess Committee, I served as the organizer of the first match in 1996 in Philadelphia, named the ACM Chess Challenge. In 1997 IBM served as its own organizer, inviting the ACM Computer Chess Committee to participate as the officiating body. That match was named the IBM Kasparov Versus Deep Blue Rematch, or the Rematch, for short. I served as head of the four-person team of officials along with Ken Thompson, Mike Valvo, and Carol Jarecki.

I have developed friendships with members of the Deep Blue team over the years and have followed their progress with great admiration. I have followed Kasparov's ascent to the top of the chess world with equal admiration, beginning with his days at the Moscow chess school of former World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik. When Kasparov was a mere teenager, Botvinnik met with us in the computer chess community and predicted his talented student would be world champion some day. Botvinnik, after retiring from competitive chess and while coaching the elite of the young Soviet chess players, developed his own chess program in the 1960s and 1970s, but it never competed with the other programs.

A detailed record of the chess achievements of IBM's program is presented in my 1997 book, Kasparov versus Deep Blue: Computer Chess Comes of Age. The first half of the book covers the history of computer chess prior to the creation of Hsu, Campbell, and Anantharaman's first program Chiptest in 1986; the second half takes the reader through the many matches played by Chiptest and its successors, ending with Deep Blue's match in the

xii Deep Blue: An Artificial Intelligence Milestone

1996 ACM Chess Challenge. Kasparov's encounters with Fritz and Chess Genius in 1994 and 1995 are also covered.

The Rematch spawned several other books on Deep Blue and Kaspa­rov, written from the perspective of strong chess players. These include Bruce Pandolfini' s Kasparov and Deep Blue: The Historic Chess Match Between Man and Machine (Simon & Schuster), Daniel King's Kasparov v Deep Blue (Batsford, London), Michael Khodarkovsky's A New Era: How Kasparov Changed the World of Chess (Ballantine Books, New York), and David Goodman and Raymond Keene's Man Versus Machine: Kasparov Versus Deep Blue (H3 Publications, Cambridge, MA.). Khodarkovsky was part of Kasparov's inner circle, and his account represents the world champion's perspective.

My intent with this book is to record the story of a great scientific achievement. I am telling the story from my perspective as a computer scientist and lifelong chess enthusiast, and as someone with years of involvement in the field both as participant and as organizer. The book is not meant to be another chess book, though it is hard to avoid chess altogether. The final game of the 1997 Rematch appears in detail in Cha pter 13, and there is considerable discussion of the moves of the other five games in the previous three chapters. For historical completeness, I have provided a comprehensive record of every significant game played by IBM's program in the appendices.

The chess-playing system - the IBM RS /6000 SP2, the third-generation VLSI chess chip and accelerator board, and the extensive chess software, collectively called Deep Blue - played its first official game of chess in Philadelphia in 1996. Chess programs that had been developed by members of the Deep Blue team and that eventually led to the creation of Deep Blue were given different names over the years. The first was Chiptest, then Deep Thought and its successive versions, later Deep Thought II. The name Deep Blue was conceived in 1992. In 1993 Nordic Deep Blue competed under the name of Deep Blue, although it was actually a version of Deep Thought II. The single-processor version of Deep Blue called Deep Blue Prototype appeared in 1995, and the next year, the complete Deep Blue finally appeared. Following the Rematch, Deep Blue Prototype was re­named Deep Blue Junior.

Chung-Jen Tan, who headed the Deep Blue team, and Gabby Silberman, currently director of the IBM Center for Advanced Studies and formerly with Tan's group in Yorktown Heights, provided valuable assistance in gethering material and obtaining access to members of the Deep Blue team and others at IBM who played a role. Without their help, I couldn't have assembled the pieces. My university granted me a sabbatical leave for the 1998-99 academic year, during which I began the research and writing of

Preface xiii

this colorful story. Several years have passed since the historic rematch and even more years since the story of Deep Blue first began. Given its great significance to the scientific world and the chess world and its implications for all of us, recording it for posterity is important.

I would like to express my appreciation to the many who helped create this book, beginning with a special thanks to CJ Tan and Gabby Silberman. I also want to thank the members of the Deep Blue team - Murray Campbell, Feng-hsiung Hsu, Joe Hoane, Jerry Brody, and Joel Benjamin. Let me also express my thanks to others at IBM who played a role in the success of Deep Blue - George Paul, Randy Moulic, Robert Morris, Zeev Barzilai, Barbara Moore, Marcy Holle, and Matt Thoennes. And finally, I would like give special thanks to members of my team of Rematch officials - Ken Thompson, Mike Valvo, and Carol Jarecki.

I would like to thank Charles Leiserson for contributing the Foreword to this book. Leiserson, a professor of computer science at MIT, was in charge of the effort that developed *Socrates (Star Socrates), Deep Blue's main competition in the months leading up to the IBM program's encoun­ters with Garry Kasparov. Charles has had a distinguished research career and is one of the leading experts in the area of computer architecture and algorithms.

Susan Rose provided invaluable editorial assistance with the manu­script, curing it of some of my writing shortcomings. I extend her many thanks for her thorough job.

The photos of Alan Turing, Norbert Weiner, and John von Neumann were provided by the Turing Institute, the MIT Museum, and the IEEE History Center, respectively. I want to thank them for allowing me to include these historical photos in this book. I also want to thank the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the picture of ASCI White, Novag Inc., for the photo of Novag Chess Robot, and IBM for the photos of its Yorktown Heights Thomas J. Watson Research Center, the Hawthorn Annex, and the Beijing Research Center. Carol Moore and Thomas Anantharaman were kind enough to send me photos of themselves, and I want to thank them for this.

The world of cartoonists is a special one, filled with very special people. A number of them gave me permission to reprint their work in this book, and I want to thank them here. This includes Jim Borgman (Cincinnati Enquirer, reprinted with permission of King Features Syndicate), Mike Thompson (Detroit Free Press with permission of Copley News Service), Mike Luckovich (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, with permission of Creators Syndicate), Brian Duffy (Des Moines Register), John Deering (Arkansas Demo­crat-Gazette), Bill DeOre (Dallas Morning News), Steve Breem (San Diego Union Tribune with permission of Copley News Service), Jeff Stahler (Cin-

xiv Deep Blue: An Artificial Intelligence Milestone

cinnati Post with permission of United Feature Syndicate), Richard Crowson (Wichita Eagle), John Sherffius (St. Louis Post Dispatch), Dwane Powell (Raleigh News & Observer with permission of Creators Syndicate), Richard Guindon (Detroit Free Press), Etta Hulme (Fort Worth Star Telegram), Don Addis (St. Petersburg Times), Kirk Walters (Toledo Blade), Doug Marlette (Newsday and Tribune Media Services), and Mike Graston (Windsor Star). These talented individuals will leave a smile on your face when you tum the final page of this book!

Monty Newborn McGill University Montreal, Canada

May 2002

Contents

Foreword ............................................................................................. v Preface ................................................................................................. ix

1 Intellectual Equals ............................................................................. 1 2 Testing the Water .............................................................................. 15 3 Gaining Experience ........................................................................... 43 4 Surviving Deep Cuts ........................................................................ 55 5 From Cape May to Beijing ............................................................... 69 6 Philadelphia ....................................................................................... 91 7 Rematch Negotiations ...................................................................... 113 8 A Faster and Smarter Deep Blue ..................................................... 119 9 Countdown to the Rematch ............................................................. 127

10 The Rematch - Game 1: Three Straight for Kasparov ................ 139 11 The Rematch - Game 2: Internet Finds Break for Deep Blue.... 153 12 The Rematch - Games 3-5: Endgame Standoffs ......................... 167 13 The Rematch - Game 6: A Sacrifice and Surprising Patience.. 187 14 Deep Blue Is Triumphant ................................................................. 211 15 The Bottom Line ................................................................................ 223 16 The Light Side of Deep Blue ............................................................ 239

Appendices

A Rules of Play for the Rematch .......................................................... 251 B Algebraic Chess Notation ................................................................. 255 C Games from Chapter 2 ...................................................................... 259 D Games from Chapter 3 ...................................................................... 265 E Games from Chapter 4 ...................................................................... 275 F Games from Chapter 5 ...................................................................... 281 G Games from the ACM Chess Challenge ......................................... 287 H Chess Program Strength, Search Depth, and Computer Speed.. 291 I Practice Games Played by Deep Blue Junior in 1997 ..................... 295 J Games from the Rematch ................................................................. 299

K Analysis of the Final Position of Game 2 ....................................... 311 L Difficult Positions for Deep Blue from the Rematch .................... 315

M Deep Blue's Printout of Game 6 of the Rematch ........................... 319

Index ................................................................................................... 329