Deep Blue: An Artificial Intelligence Milestone

s a competitor of the Deep Blue team, I had mixed emotions as I A watched their chess-playing machine defeat World Chess Cham­ pion Garry Kasparov during their 1997 Rematch. On the one hand, it meant that our MIT program, *Socrates, would not be the first program to defeat a human World Chess Champion. On the other hand, I felt great admiration for the monumental engineering accomplishment that Deep Blue's victory represented, and proud for the small part that my own team had played in advancing computer-chess research. After over 50 years of concerted effort to produce a chess-playing machine capable of beating the best human, Deep Blue finally attained the goal that so many computer scientists had sought. In this entertaining and informative book, Monty Newborn chronicles the story of Deep Blue, from its origins as Chiptest at Carnegie Mellon University to its winning the Rematch as a top IBM research project. You do not have to be a chess player or a computer scientist to enjoy this marvelous tale of man and machine. Monty paints the characters of this drama in vivid colors, from the technical geniuses CB Hsu, Murray Camp­ bell, and Thomas Anantharaman to the visionary manager CJ Tan. As only an insider can, Monty recreates the excitement of the event, including the IBM marketing hype and the marvelous compendium of editorial cartoons.