Chess Hardware

[ethanara]

Hello
I saw the movie "game over kasparov" for a while ago, and they talked about that Deep Blue was not only Chess software, But also Chess hardware.
How can you make a "chess hardware"? I have never really heard about It.
Ethan
Ps. Is it maybe possible to make a OS that only runs the chess program ? I think Deep Blue had that. It would be something like Chrome OS

[mmcknight]

FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) are an example.

[Dann Corbit]

There are articles on the net that explain in detail the inner workings of Deep Blue and Deeper Blue.

The Deep* Blue machines used an IBM RS/6000 and the operating system was AIX. Most of the grunt work was done by custom FPGAs designed by Hsu and Campbell. The RS/6000 was mostly used for communication, but also custom programmed to tie the SMP results together.

Basically, it was a UNIX box with a bunch of special purpose boards stuffed into the expansion slots (480 Chess CPUs, IIRC)

[marcelk]

There are articles on the net that explain in detail the inner workings of Deep Blue and Deeper Blue.

The Deep* Blue machines used an IBM RS/6000 and the operating system was AIX. Most of the grunt work was done by custom FPGAs designed by Hsu and Campbell. The RS/6000 was mostly used for communication, but also custom programmed to tie the SMP results together.

Basically, it was a UNIX box with a bunch of special purpose boards stuffed into the expansion slots (480 Chess CPUs, IIRC)

DB and all of its predecessors didn't use FPGAs but ASICs: Dedicated chip for chess move generation, evaluation and search, designed at transistor level and manufactured in 0.6 micron CMOS. An amazing feat and incredible how the IBM site manages to pretend that all the chess power came from their RS/6000 commercial offerings. The RS/6000 were just glueing the chess chips together. It is like crediting the support frame for its performance.

A good read is Hsu's book, who was the chess chip designer and founder of the project: http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Deep-Blue- ... 0691090653

[jshriver]

A good read is Hsu's book, who was the chess chip designer and founder of the project: http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Deep-Blue- ... 0691090653

Nice didn't know about that book. Just did a quick search and was lucky to get it on ebay for $9 w/ free shipping. Can't wait to read.

[uaf]

A good read is Hsu's book, who was the chess chip designer and founder of the project: http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Deep-Blue- ... 0691090653

That is a really interesting book to read. I found an hardcover copy in perfect confitions for just 5 or 6 euros some years ago at abebooks.

[nkg114mc]

I read an article which introduced the Deep Blue II system years ago. In fact Deep Blue II is a cluster system, which owned not only one computer or CPU.

As I remenbered, there are 32 nodes in the cluster, one was for file recording, and one as Master nodes, the left 30 nodes as child node. All node were connected together using high speed switch.

For each child node computer, there were 16 specific designed "Chess Chips" connected to CPU with bus(I forgot what bus it is, I dont know hardware much). Each chess chip can do a search and also has evaluation function with a number of features.

When began a search, firstly the master node got the root position, and expanded it for 3 plies into a full MinMax tree(Is it correct? or a alpha-beta tree?). Then passed the leaf positions to each child node computer. Secondly, on each child node computer, each position was expanded to 9 plies using the POWER CPU, then all these leaf positions was passed to Chess Chips. Finally, each Chess Chip expanded the position they got to 14 plies or more using the circuit on the chip.

I have read the book Behind Deep Blue. It's a really interesting book! Because the Chess Chip designer and also the book author Hsu is from Taiwan, I read the Chinese edition ~