Deep Blue vs todays (computer chess programs)

Deep blue was a supercomputer, not a program ;)

We don't have an exact rating for Deep Blue because it did not play enough games against rated players to be rated.

From this website, "In six years, a program like Deep Fritz will again achieve Deep Blue’s ability to analyze 200 million board positions per second. Deep Fritz-like chess programs running on ordinary personal computers will routinely defeat all humans later in this decade."

This article was written in 2002. I would not be surprised that any decent home computer could play as well or better than Deep Blue considering how fast computing speeds grow.

Evaluation functions have also become more sophisticated and finer tuned.

It's not hard to say at all.

The fact that those Kasparov matches were even close tells you that Deep Blue was playing at about Super GM strength.

Engines today exceed that level of play easily, and a similar match (Engine vs. Super GM) with today's top engines on today's top consumer level hardware would be no contest, and that's still with room to throw better hardware at it.

Deep Blue is OLD (by computing standards).

Quoting Wired magazine,

"If you look at the supercomputer that Deep Blue ran on, I think a present-day Cell processor has as much processing power as that entire system did in 1997."

Many PCs nowadays have duo or quad cores.... couple that with a better search algorithim (Deep blue used brute force), and you've beaten deep blue.

Running a dedicated computer running a fast OS (such as linux) and a good engine would most likely beat Deep blue, every time.

My new i7 is vastly faster than the AMD 64 that I bought three years ago.

I believe that Hiarcs on my iPad could draw Deep Blue in a match. 

I would love to see my Deep Fritz 13 play against someone's PC running the Houdini engine.

Anyone up for the challenge? Message me, and we'll set up a 3 days per turn game, with computer positional analysis between moves.

My PC:

Windows 7 Ultimate x64

16 GB DDR 3 RAM

AMD Phenom II Quad 965 CPU

I would especially love to put my computer against a comparable Intel chipset.

Impressive hardware! Post your Benchmark figure to facilitate comparison.

iixpro is on the money about this one - Ray Kurzweil knows what he is talking about. The article he linked explains everything; in conclusion: Deep blue was hardware, not software; it was very fast for its time because it ran on ASICs (application specific ICs) designed to play chess; Deep blue could evaluate about 200 million positions a second, which I believe a modern quad core roughly matches; modern engines are FAR superior and can see many ply deeper because of a) alpha beta pruning b) null move heuristics c) game databases d) tablebases e) neural networks. As a result, modern chess engines set up on your quad core can see many ply deeper than Deep Blue.

Don't bash the IBM guys for failing to engage in the same pruning because their unique architecture may have inhibited it. Deep Blue was ridiculously good at chess for its time.

Here's a link to the article if you missed it.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/deep-fritz-draws-are-humans-getting-smarter-or-are-computers-getting-stupider-2

I am in this business and I really have to say that Ray is on the money here.

I think if deep blue was upgraded using the programming resources and the advancements in technology to the same software level as Houdini, it would crush these engines.

If one takes an old broom and replaces both the handle and the head, is it the same broom?

Fritz, Hiarcs, Shredder, Crafty, Junior all existed when Deep Blue played. Deep Blue was more powerful becuase of hardware not software. All of those engines have improved, and running on today's home computers, are vastly stronger that Deep Blue.

Nonetheless, if you replaced Deep Blue's programming with the much superior programs of today, and ran the programming on much improved IBM supercomputers, the new configuration could beat your home box.

It would need a new name. It's no longer Deep Blue.

IBM is not interested. Garry Kasparov's last man vs. machine match was in 2003 against a laptop running Fritz 8.5. The match was drawn, as I recall.

They are not interested in chess (that much) anymore. They are more interested in jeopardy. They already beat the best human players with Watson.

I prefer the name Deep Yellow since the IBM team refused to have a rematch after beating Kasparov.I think the tweaking by Joel Benjamin had alot to do with IBM's victory.

IBM beat Kasparov? I thought Deep Blue/Yellow won through pure cheating(i.e never showing games, changing program between games, etc). Anyways, you can't beat a player who changes style as quickly as Deep Blue did!

I think the next generation of chess programs will have style programmed into them so that they have a human side to them and the mistakes they make will be based on the style they have!

I'm told that Houdini has more of a personality than most modern engines.

Some modern programs do have "style" in them. The chess.com computers, for example, value pawns waaaay too much. I've once played against an engine which allowed you to select various "players", each with their own characteristic. For example, one would like to trade queens, and others would go for as closed position.

If IBM or some other company decides to make another machine to beat a world class player I would name it Mean Machine.

Just to make it interesting, I would make a weight limit on the actual computer: The same weight as the human opponent.

There are known chess engines with strenght cca 3200 elo and human players 2800+ with chess engines getting stronger faster then humans so logical question is how far it can go? 4000? Or maybe 10000? Considering that engine with 200 pts highest elo beats the otherone 3 times in four games

This is probably the reason why IBM would not let Deep Blue play again. Kasparov is a very, very bad loser and he kept throwing out baseless accusations. For IBM the whole thing is only worth it if they can get some good PR out of it and for that you just can't trust Kasparov to behave himself. 

Houdini 3 running on average PC would crush Deep Blue. It would be no contest at all. 

I would go so far as to give Deep Blue a time handicap of 10 minutes to 3 hours.

10 minutes for Houdini 3 and 1 hour for Deep Blue. Even in this case I don't think Deep Blue would stand a chance.

I own George Washington's axe -- the one he used to cut down the cherry tree of lore.

Granted it's had eight new heads and about a dozen new handles....