ChipTest was a 1985

chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to disti ...

playing

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...

built by

Feng-hsiung Hsu Feng-hsiung Hsu (born January 1, 1959) () (nicknamed Crazy Bird) is a Taiwanese-American computer scientist and the author of the book ''Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion''. His work led to the creati ...

Thomas Anantharaman Thomas S. Anantharaman is a computer statistician specializing in Bayesian inference approaches for NP-complete problems. He is best known for his work with Feng-hsiung Hsu from 1985-1990 on the Chess playing computers ChipTest and Deep Th ...

and

Murray Campbell Murray Campbell is a Canadian computer scientist known for being part of the team that created Deep Blue; the first computer to defeat a world chess champion. Biography Campbell was involved in surveillance projects related to petroleum produ ...

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

. It is the predecessor of Deep Thought which in turn evolved into

Deep Blue Deep Blue may refer to: Film * ''Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads'', a 1992 documentary film about Mississippi Delta blues music * Deep Blue (2001 film), ''Deep Blue'' (2001 film), a film by Dwight H. Little * Deep Blue (2003 ...

. ChipTest was based on a special

VLSI Very large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when MOS integrated circuit (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) c ...

-technology move generator chip developed by Hsu. ChipTest was controlled by a

Sun-3 Sun-3 is a series of UNIX computer workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched on September 9, 1985. The Sun-3 series are VMEbus-based systems similar to some of the earlier Sun-2 series, but using the Motorola 68020 micropro ...

/160 workstation and capable of searching approximately 50,000 moves per second. Hsu and Anantharaman entered ChipTest in the 1986

North American Computer Chess Championship The North American Computer Chess Championship was a computer chess championship held from 1970 to 1994. It was organised by the Association for Computing Machinery and by Monty Newborn, Professor of Computer Science at McGill University. It was one ...

, and it was only partially tested when the tournament began. It lost its first two rounds, but finished with an even score. In August 1987 ChipTest was overhauled and renamed ChipTest-M, ''M'' standing for

microcode In processor design, microcode (μcode) is a technique that interposes a layer of computer organization between the central processing unit (CPU) hardware and the programmer-visible instruction set architecture of a computer. Microcode is a laye ...

. The new version had eliminated ChipTest's bugs and was ten times faster, searching 500,000 moves per second and running on a

Sun-4 Sun-4 is a series of Unix workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched in 1987. The original Sun-4 series were VMEbus-based systems similar to the earlier Sun-3 series, but employing microprocessors based on Sun's own SPARC V7 RIS ...

workstation. ChipTest-M won the North American Computer Chess Championship in 1987 with a 4–0 sweep. ChipTest was invited to play in the 1987 American Open, but the team did not enter due to an objection by the

HiTech HiTech is a chess machine built at Carnegie Mellon University under the direction of World Correspondence Chess Champion Dr. Hans J. Berliner, by Berliner, Carl Ebeling, Murray Campbell, and Gordon Goetsch. HiTech was the first computer chess s ...

team, also from Carnegie Mellon University. HiTech and ChipTest shared some code, and Hitech was already playing in the tournament. The two teams became rivals. Designing and implementing ChipTest revealed many possibilities for improvement, so the designers started on a new machine. Deep Thought 0.01 was created in May 1988 and the version 0.02 in November the same year. This new version had two customized VLSI chess processors and it was able to search 720,000 moves per second. With the "0.02" dropped from its name, Deep Thought won the

World Computer Chess Championship World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) is an event held periodically since 1974 where computer chess engines compete against each other. The event is organized by the International Computer Games Association. It is often held in conjunction with ...

with a perfect 5–0 score in 1989.

References

* *

External links

The making of Deep Blue
overview, IBM Research Chess computers One-of-a-kind computers Carnegie Mellon University {{chess-stub

See also

References

External links