Computer chess, then and now: The deep blue saga

Abstract

Back in 1985, at this very same conference, a young graduate student presented a paper unrelated to computer chess. It was 36 years after Claude Shannon's 1949 seminal talk on chess computers. Chess computers had just crossed the milestone of playing at national master level, but were still a long way off from playing at Grandmaster level, let along challenging the World Champion. VLSI had recently been applied to the computer chess problem with some success. The graduate student had some ideas of his own, and with some soul searching, decided to take the plunge after returning from the conference. This talk will describe what happened in the intervening years till now, including the match in February 1996 and the rematch in May 1997 between Deep Blue and Gary Kasparov, the World Champion.