ChipTest

ChipTestwas a 1985chessplayingcomputerbuilt byFeng-hsiung Hsu,Thomas AnantharamanandMurray CampbellatCarnegie Mellon University.It is the predecessor ofDeep Thoughtwhich in turn evolved intoDeep Blue.

History

ChipTest was based on a specialVLSI-technology move generator chip developed by Hsu. ChipTest was controlled by aSun-3/160 workstation and capable of searching approximately 50,000 moves per second. Hsu and Anantharaman entered ChipTest in the 1986North American Computer Chess Championship,and it was only partially tested when the tournament began.It lost its first two rounds, but finished with an even score.

In August 1987 ChipTest was overhauled and renamed ChipTest-M,Mstanding formicrocode.The new version had eliminated ChipTest's bugs and was ten times faster, searching 500,000 moves per second and running on aSun-4workstation. ChipTest-M won the North American Computer Chess Championship in 1987 with a 4–0 sweep.

ChipTest was invited to play in the 1987 American Open, but the team did not enter due to an objection by theHiTechteam, also from Carnegie Mellon University. HiTech and ChipTest shared some code, and Hitech was already playing in the tournament. The two teams became rivals.

Designing and implementing ChipTest revealed many possibilities for improvement, so the designers started on a new machine.Deep Thought0.01 was created in May 1988 and the version 0.02 in November the same year. This new version had two customized VLSI chess processors and it was able to search 720,000 moves per second. With the "0.02" dropped from its name, Deep Thought won theWorld Computer Chess Championshipwith a perfect 5–0 score in 1989.

See also

• Computer chess
• Deep Thought,the second in the line of chess computers developed byFeng-hsiung Hsu
• Deep Blue (chess computer),another chess computer developed byFeng-hsiung Hsu,being the first computer to win a chess match against the world champion

References

• Hsu, Feng-Hsiung (2002).Behind Deep Blue.Princeton: Princeton University Press.ISBN0-691-09065-3.
• Newborn, Monroe (1997).Kasparov Versus Deep Blue.Berlin: Springer.ISBN0-387-94820-1.

External links

• The making of Deep Blue,overview, IBM Research