Father wrote:Dear Doctor Robert Hyatt
First of all, in order to respect your position or status as professor and scientist as you are, it is very important for me, to write this little sentence, with all humility, because of, I am not a Mathematician person, or a scientist, or a person that is in high development of any project. Then I hope, you take my words with some consideration, about my own amateur side, and obvious limitation and probably margin of error.
I believe, or better, I have sniffed ever, than Deep Blue, was a Nihilist Project, where, the team works as a pawn8naive or innocent) of a high monetary interest by itself, without the knowledge for them, about that. The priority over all, was for the engine team, beat to Mister Kasparov, and then Mister Kasparov were other pawn that discover his condition of pawn only after the debacle of their six Karajan(??) game.
Mister Kasparov If my memory is not failing, told us, that he was feeling as playing against a different opponent, game per game. Then, it looks for me ever, as a modification into Deep Blue parameters or preference, game per game. I don’t have any prove about that, and I wont have any prove about that in my first travel in the Earth, now, but if that was true, was unfair, and against Mister Kasparov and our human being condition.
But as a consequence of a Nihilist project or goal, where reason and faith was forgiven, human beings when assembled the computer they built the chess machine player, and when they(I.B.M.), took apart or striped down the engine, they created the Myth ... then, history was fooled by itself. Why? Because everybody forgot the importance, of faith and reason, as the base of Western civilization.
Best,
Pablo
That's Kasparov's "line". But it was far from the truth, initially. I believe that throughout the 80's and early 90's, _every_ computer chess author's goal was to beat the current world champion, who was, at the time, Kasparov. But none of us pursued that specific goal by studying his games and such. We tried to develop the best, fastest, smartest engines we could, given the hardware we had available. Some of us had better hardware than others (I was an example, using 30+ million dollar Cray computers.) The Deep Thought project, started around 1985, was just a continuation of the hardware approaches started by Belle, Bebe and HiTech. They played in _every_ ACM computer chess tournament. They played in Human tournaments all over the US and even some outside the US when they could enter. Only after they finished their degrees at CMU and were hired by IBM did their direction change. IBM wanted to build the biggest and fastest chess computer ever made. To this day they are certainly faster than anything seen so far, peaking at one billion nodes per second. IBM pulled the strings for the two Kasparov matches, because of the incredible publicity they knew they would obtain should they win.
But the project overall was hardly just about beating Kasparov. It was to beat every player on the planet, including Kasparov who happened to be at the top of the heap.
As far as the changing DB between rounds, there never has been a stipulation to make that illegal. Humans can go off between rounds and decide to play a different opening, or they can decide to play more positional than tactical this game to surprise their opponent, or whatever. Many chess programmers are busy tweaking between rounds. But most mature programmers do not do this, knowing how easy it is to introduce errors, which can lose a key game. I do not know whether deep blue was modified between rounds or not. It was too long ago. I used to talk to those guys regularly, Id know Murray for many years and we had tested various ideas together many times. I just don't remember whether they made any changes or not. But more importantly, who cares? There was certainly no rule preventing it.
Kasparov was busy throwing a tantrum, and might have mentioned anything he could to create suspicion. He should have just stood up, shook their hand, and said "I won't let that happen again." and he may well have won the third match, had that happened. But he didn't, he accused them of cheating, and any chance for a third and deciding match evaporated on the spot.
None of us that were active at the time had any doubt about the strength of the machine. Many of us played them multiple games, and watched them win almost every computer chess event from 1987 on, not to mention their performance against a wide range of strong human players in all sorts of tournaments and matches. The machine was a beast. Some today might well be as good or better. But in 1996 or so there was _nothing_ even remotely close to DB, in terms of other programs or hardware. Absolutely nothing.
