He may be a humble researcher dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, but in May, C. J. Tan might just cut loose and play to win. That’s when his new and improved chess-playing supercomputer, Deep Blue, is scheduled to meet world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a rematch of last February’s heartbreaker, which Deep Blue, despite surprising almost everybody by taking the first game, lost, 4-2.
This time, Tan and his colleagues at ibm think Deep Blue has a better shot at being the first machine to beat the reigning human in a championship match. For one thing, they’ve learned the hard way that raw computing speed--Deep Blue crunches 200 million moves a second, to Kasparov’s two--is simply not enough to beat the formidable Russian. Tan says he’s not even going to bother making the machine any faster for the rematch. What we lacked in the system was chess-specific knowledge ...
