December 1998, Issue 101

Hot Chips

CHESS CHIP

You can always count on Hot Chips to deliver a bit of technical whimsy, this time in the form of "Designing a single-chip chess grandmaster while knowing nothing about chess" by Feng-hsiung Hsu of IBM.

What started a decade ago as a student project at Carnegie Mellon was cultivated into Deep Blue by IBM. I consider the 1997 match win by the machine over world chess champion Kasparov a remarkable success.

The nice thing about Deep Blue is that you don’t have to be a techno-guru to get it. There’s none of the neural network, fuzzy, or AI hot air you might expect. Instead, the machine, composed of 480 custom chess chips (see Photo 1), relies on brute-force move evaluation to the tune of 200 million positions per second.

Hsu notes, "Speed alone might not be enough," pointing out that, "human grand masters in serious matches, learn from computers’ mistakes, exploit the weaknesses, and drive a truck through the gaping holes."

Deep Blue tries to create evaluation terms that overcome known weaknesses and adds hooks to deal with new ones using external FPGAs. It supplements brute-force evaluation with ROM-based endgame logic, depicted in Figure 5, that handles the well-known variations that characterize the final moments of a match.

What’s next? Hsu projects that migrating to 0.35-µm process (from 0.6 µm) for higher integration and faster clock rate will enable a small array of chips plugged into a PC to beat the best the human race has to offer.