sje wrote:It was along time ago, so I'm a bit hazy on details, so some of this might be inaccurate.
1) Belle existed in several versions, the first of which was software only. I believe that this was the same program that was distributed (source and object) as part of the standard Bell Labs Unix back in the mid 1970s. I can recall playing it on a DEC pdp11-70 (eight 16 bit registers with 22 bit physical address space) way back then. As I recall, it was the only program around that could handle move input in either algebraic or descriptive notation.
Pretty much. All I want to add is that there are actually several versions of T.Belle floating around.
Some with assembler and others with C, some with a little more advanced evaluator, etc.
As for the descriptive notation... I don't remember that part.
2) The software side of every Belle ran on an LSI-11 (or similar pdp-11 system) and was in charge of I/O, hardware control, and the upper region of a search tree. It was only the last version of Belle that had an A/B search in hardware; earlier hardware was similar in spirit to the Cheops machine from Greenblatt at MIT.
The last version is the only one that matters.
The first one was soley experimental proof of concept.
The second was more advanced, but was still a "let's see how well this works" kind of thing.
And speaking of Cheops, the source for the modified TECH-II that was used with Cheops is available. Unfortunately, the source for MacHackVI isn't. He doesn't seem to want to hunt for it, even if it still exists. I can't find an email address for him to ask him directly though.
3) The 160 Knode/second figure was achieved in part because the Belle hardware would skip completion of position factor evaluation at a node if the material score was too far outside the current A/B window. The rate for quiet positions was rather less, but still good enough for a USCF Master rating.
KT & JC said it had a node rate of 100k to 200k depending on the position.
4) In all of history, the State Department of the United States has gone chasing after only two strong chessplayers: Fischer and Belle. Belle was kidnapped by the US government and held for a couple of weeks prior to a tour of Russia because of the irrational fear that the Soviets would steal its secrets to win the Cold War.
More concerned about the hardware itself. Some of it was state of the art that wasn't supposed to be exported. Regardless whether it played chess or not.
That was the funny part. A standard PDP11/70 was rack-mounted in the top. The rest was built from off-the-shelf PLA chips that you could buy anywhere in the world, including Radio Shack. Ken told the state department, when they impounded the thing at the airport, "The only military use would be to fly over someone and drop it out of an airplane and hope it hit something important..."
The Soviets were already doing quite a bit of industrial espionage and reproducing US & European computer equipment.
They probably already had all the hardware info they could have gotten from Belle, but it did still contain equipment that wasn't supposed to be exported.
And I have to frown a bit on your use of 'kidnapped'. Impounded would be the right term for a computer.
5) Deep Blue and its predecessors were really not much more than replicated Belle-on-a-chip systems. I am somewhat saddened but not surprised that the media failed to mention this during IBM's marketing blitz.
Wouldn't have been much point. Nice, but not much point.
DB was so far beyond Belle that it would have made as much sense to mention CHEOPS.
Neither would have meant anything to most people.
Belle ran on, what, a base 10mhz clock? Cheops on 5.5mhz.
Hard to compare either of them to Deep Blue.
Actually if you look at the development, a deep thought / deep blue chip were initially "belle on a chip". Hsu made one significant improvement on the design to get rid of the "move stack" so that the thing would fit on a single chip, and then later versions used the same search approach but removed the "hard-coded" eval and replaced it by lots of table lookups that made it easy to modify eval weights and terms.
sje wrote:It was along time ago, so I'm a bit hazy on details, so some of this might be inaccurate.
1) Belle existed in several versions, the first of which was software only. I believe that this was the same program that was distributed (source and object) as part of the standard Bell Labs Unix back in the mid 1970s. I can recall playing it on a DEC pdp11-70 (eight 16 bit registers with 22 bit physical address space) way back then. As I recall, it was the only program around that could handle move input in either algebraic or descriptive notation.
Pretty much. All I want to add is that there are actually several versions of T.Belle floating around.
Some with assembler and others with C, some with a little more advanced evaluator, etc.
As for the descriptive notation... I don't remember that part.
2) The software side of every Belle ran on an LSI-11 (or similar pdp-11 system) and was in charge of I/O, hardware control, and the upper region of a search tree. It was only the last version of Belle that had an A/B search in hardware; earlier hardware was similar in spirit to the Cheops machine from Greenblatt at MIT.
The last version is the only one that matters.
The first one was soley experimental proof of concept.
The second was more advanced, but was still a "let's see how well this works" kind of thing.
And speaking of Cheops, the source for the modified TECH-II that was used with Cheops is available. Unfortunately, the source for MacHackVI isn't. He doesn't seem to want to hunt for it, even if it still exists. I can't find an email address for him to ask him directly though.
3) The 160 Knode/second figure was achieved in part because the Belle hardware would skip completion of position factor evaluation at a node if the material score was too far outside the current A/B window. The rate for quiet positions was rather less, but still good enough for a USCF Master rating.
KT & JC said it had a node rate of 100k to 200k depending on the position.
4) In all of history, the State Department of the United States has gone chasing after only two strong chessplayers: Fischer and Belle. Belle was kidnapped by the US government and held for a couple of weeks prior to a tour of Russia because of the irrational fear that the Soviets would steal its secrets to win the Cold War.
More concerned about the hardware itself. Some of it was state of the art that wasn't supposed to be exported. Regardless whether it played chess or not.
That was the funny part. A standard PDP11/70 was rack-mounted in the top. The rest was built from off-the-shelf PLA chips that you could buy anywhere in the world, including Radio Shack. Ken told the state department, when they impounded the thing at the airport, "The only military use would be to fly over someone and drop it out of an airplane and hope it hit something important..."
The Soviets were already doing quite a bit of industrial espionage and reproducing US & European computer equipment.
They probably already had all the hardware info they could have gotten from Belle, but it did still contain equipment that wasn't supposed to be exported.
And I have to frown a bit on your use of 'kidnapped'. Impounded would be the right term for a computer.
5) Deep Blue and its predecessors were really not much more than replicated Belle-on-a-chip systems. I am somewhat saddened but not surprised that the media failed to mention this during IBM's marketing blitz.
Wouldn't have been much point. Nice, but not much point.
DB was so far beyond Belle that it would have made as much sense to mention CHEOPS.
Neither would have meant anything to most people.
Belle ran on, what, a base 10mhz clock? Cheops on 5.5mhz.
Hard to compare either of them to Deep Blue.
Actually if you look at the development, deep thought / deep blue chips were initially "belle on a chip". Hsu made one significant improvement on the design to get rid of the "move stack" so that the thing would fit on a single chip, and then later versions used the same search approach but removed the "hard-coded" eval and replaced it by lots of table lookups that made it easy to modify eval weights and terms.
bob wrote:Actually if you look at the development, deep thought / deep blue chips were initially "belle on a chip". Hsu made one significant improvement on the design to get rid of the "move stack" so that the thing would fit on a single chip, and then later versions used the same search approach but removed the "hard-coded" eval and replaced it by lots of table lookups that made it easy to modify eval weights and terms.
All in all, a single CT/DT/DB chip was still a derivative work of Belle in a very strong sense. And Belle designers Thompson and Condon got nary a mention in the popular media for their work. Even worse is that the specialized media, written by those who should have known better, said little about the hardware heritage.
Although Cheops and early Belle hardware were somewhat similar, they were (if I recall correctly) developed contemporaneously. The later Hitech was truly different and perhaps one day it will see a successor.
bob wrote:That was the funny part. A standard PDP11/70 was rack-mounted in the top. The rest was built from off-the-shelf PLA chips that you could buy anywhere in the world, including Radio Shack. Ken told the state department, when they impounded the thing at the airport, "The only military use would be to fly over someone and drop it out of an airplane and hope it hit something important..."
Yes, that incident was written up in _Chess Life and Review_. I thought it was a bit amusing because at that time it was well known that not only did the Soviet Union have various pdp11 clones, but so did a couple of Eastern European Block countries.
Eight years ago when I bought my Apple PowerMac desktop box (400 MHz PPC G4), it came with an agreement that I could not sell or otherwise transfer it to several countries on the State Department's evildoer list. "Your tax dollars, hard at work."
bob wrote:
That was the funny part. A standard PDP11/70 was rack-mounted in the top. The rest was built from off-the-shelf PLA chips that you could buy anywhere in the world, including Radio Shack. Ken told the state department, when they impounded the thing at the airport, "The only military use would be to fly over someone and drop it out of an airplane and hope it hit something important..."
I can't find the reference and I may be incorrectly remembering what I read, but wasn't one of the things they were objecting to was the hard drive?
Can't remember any details, but I think it was a state of the art, high capacity hard drive and that was one of the parts they were objecting to.
It wasn't so much belle itself as to some of the stuff it was built upon.
I think, but don't hold me to this, one of the other items was actually the display terminal being shipped with it.
The terminal was a standard and quite common DEC VT-100, only slightly advanced from its hernia-inducing VT-52 predecessor.
The VT-100 was not a bad terminal, but it wasn't anything earth shaking. Its ability to switch between 80 column and 132 column mode and to vertical scroll a pixel row at a time weren't going to help the Evil Axis of the day in their quest for world domination. I used a VT-100 for years and it had a hard time keeping up with a 9600 bps serial link.
What happened is that some State Department chowderhead saw a big box with flashing lights. Instead of taking some time to investigate the harmless and totally open design, he took the easy way out and inconvenienced all in the process.
Of course, this couldn't happen today (cough... "no-fly-list" cough...), could it?
bob wrote:Actually if you look at the development, deep thought / deep blue chips were initially "belle on a chip". Hsu made one significant improvement on the design to get rid of the "move stack" so that the thing would fit on a single chip, and then later versions used the same search approach but removed the "hard-coded" eval and replaced it by lots of table lookups that made it easy to modify eval weights and terms.
All in all, a single CT/DT/DB chip was still a derivative work of Belle in a very strong sense. And Belle designers Thompson and Condon got nary a mention in the popular media for their work. Even worse is that the specialized media, written by those who should have known better, said little about the hardware heritage.
Although Cheops and early Belle hardware were somewhat similar, they were (if I recall correctly) developed contemporaneously. The later Hitech was truly different and perhaps one day it will see a successor.
Certainly the DT/DB guys gave Ken credit. In fact Ken was heavily involved in the original chiptest development. I had long conversations with him the first time I saw chiptest play in 1987 (I believe). He had a theory that going too deep would lead to very passive play since you could see all sorts of threats and try to parry them, when your opponent would not really see any of them. But in any case, I have seen Belle cited in their publications and mentioned in their discussions, even if the "press" failed to make mention of it.
bob wrote:
That was the funny part. A standard PDP11/70 was rack-mounted in the top. The rest was built from off-the-shelf PLA chips that you could buy anywhere in the world, including Radio Shack. Ken told the state department, when they impounded the thing at the airport, "The only military use would be to fly over someone and drop it out of an airplane and hope it hit something important..."
I can't find the reference and I may be incorrectly remembering what I read, but wasn't one of the things they were objecting to was the hard drive?
Can't remember any details, but I think it was a state of the art, high capacity hard drive and that was one of the parts they were objecting to.
It wasn't so much belle itself as to some of the stuff it was built upon.
I think, but don't hold me to this, one of the other items was actually the display terminal being shipped with it.
I would hope not. The display terminal was nothing special. As far as the disk, that I don't remember. I don't remember it being anything special however...
bob wrote:Certainly the DT/DB guys gave Ken credit. In fact Ken was heavily involved in the original chiptest development. I had long conversations with him the first time I saw chiptest play in 1987 (I believe). He had a theory that going too deep would lead to very passive play since you could see all sorts of threats and try to parry them, when your opponent would not really see any of them. But in any case, I have seen Belle cited in their publications and mentioned in their discussions, even if the "press" failed to make mention of it.
Yet it is the popular press that usually wins in the long run. For example, Henry Ford is often credited with inventing the automobile, or at least the automobile assembly line. In truth, he did neither. The one original idea that Ford did have was the one he got while touring a Swift Meatpacking Company pork processing facility. Ford watched hogs being turned into lunchmeat in Swift's disassembly line and got the brainstorm that the process could be run in reverse.
bob wrote:
That was the funny part. A standard PDP11/70 was rack-mounted in the top. The rest was built from off-the-shelf PLA chips that you could buy anywhere in the world, including Radio Shack. Ken told the state department, when they impounded the thing at the airport, "The only military use would be to fly over someone and drop it out of an airplane and hope it hit something important..."
I can't find the reference and I may be incorrectly remembering what I read, but wasn't one of the things they were objecting to was the hard drive?
Can't remember any details, but I think it was a state of the art, high capacity hard drive and that was one of the parts they were objecting to.
It wasn't so much belle itself as to some of the stuff it was built upon.
I think, but don't hold me to this, one of the other items was actually the display terminal being shipped with it.
I would hope not. The display terminal was nothing special. As far as the disk, that I don't remember. I don't remember it being anything special however...
You may be right.
I was thinking that it was something Ken Thompson himself said about it. That's what stuck in my head.
But I can't find the reference at all. Something on the web, somewhere.
There was that line about dropping it from the airplane, and I thought he went on to mention a few things that the state department was actually objecting to.
