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Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion

Feng-Hsiung Hsu

3.79 · Rating details · 131 ratings · 14 reviews

On May 11, 1997, as millions worldwide watched a stunning victory unfold on television, a machine shocked the chess world by defeating the defending world champion, Garry Kasparov. Written by the man who started the adventure, Behind Deep Blue reveals the inside story of what happened behind the scenes at the two historic Deep Blue vs. Kasparov matches. This is also the ...more

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Hardcover, 320 pages

Published October 6th 2002 by Princeton University Press (first published 2002)

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Oct 06, 2009 Manny rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: games, history-and-biography, science, the-tragedy-of-chess

If this book had been written forty years earlier, it would have been a typical piece of hard science-fiction. In fact, there is an SF short story by Fritz Leiber, The Sixty-Four Square Madhouse, which is quite similar. Like everyone else, I knew the bare bones of the real life version. A group of smart computer scientists at IBM built an extremely strong chess computer called Deep Blue, with the express aim of beating World Champion Garry Kasparov in a match. They played two matches, each of If this book had been written forty years earlier, it would have been a typical piece of hard science-fiction. In fact, there is an SF short story by Fritz Leiber, The Sixty-Four Square Madhouse, which is quite similar. Like everyone else, I knew the bare bones of the real life version. A group of smart computer scientists at IBM built an extremely strong chess computer called Deep Blue, with the express aim of beating World Champion Garry Kasparov in a match. They played two matches, each of six games. In the first match, the machine won Game 1, but was then comprehensively outplayed by Kasparov. In the second match, the score was tied at 2.5 - 2.5, when Kasparov played a risky opening in the last game, and was crushed.

But I hadn't heard any of the details, and they were fascinating. Hsu, the author, was an extremely gifted and hard-working chip designer. In the late 80s, he was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where Hans Berliner, a former World Correspondence Chess Champion, led a team which had pioneered the idea of building custom chess chips to get extra-fast search. Berliner's machine was indeed chalking up results which were impressive for the time, but Hsu was sure he could do better. I don't know VLSI, so I couldn't follow all the details, but one important point was that he thought he could get all the important stuff on a single chip, speeding things up a great deal.

Some of the early stages provided good examples of the old saw about genius being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Chips these days are almost always designed at an abstract level, with a compiler handling the concrete layout of the components. Hsu's design was very close to succeeding, but the compiler couldn't quite squeeze it all on to the surface of the chip. Most people would have given up, but Hsu spent several days working nonstop to do the layout by hand; he had to place about 40,000 components. Sort of the hardware architecture equivalent of cleaning your whole house with a toothbrush.

After a while, Hsu's chips were in business, and a team of people had come together around them. The prototype machine, dubbed Deep Thought, started getting good results. But now, at least according to Hsu, they ran into a lot of trouble with Berliner's team. First, Berliner's people rubbished Hsu's ideas; then, when it became obvious that things were going in a good direction, they tried to make out that Deep Thought was really part of their project. I am not sure whether this is the whole truth. I have read most of Berliner's papers, and greatly admire him. I met him once and talked for a couple of hours, and he seemed like a very nice guy; it doesn't sound like the kind of thing he would do. But what do I know.

At any rate, the Deep Thought gang made steady progress. Hsu kept refining the chips, working day and night; he gives you a lot of technical detail. There are some striking anecdotes. The best and scariest one is about the day he was coming back from the chip plant with a new batch. A car suddenly pulled out of a side street and drove right towards him. He had a second or two to see that a crash was inevitable. While he was recovering in hospital, a colleague asked him what his thoughts were during those two seconds. "I thought I was going to die," said Hsu, "and I was sad, because that would be the end of the project." His friend was shocked. But Hsu said that, at that point, the project was his whole life, and he really couldn't have thought anything else.

Finally, after many adventures, the team ended up playing the fateful second match against Kasparov. They were told over and over again by senior management that they had to treat their great opponent with the utmost respect. Above all, there was to be no crowing if they were fortunate enough to win. When they did indeed win the sixth game, they followed orders, though Hsu says that it was of course extremely difficult. They had worked their guts out for seven or eight years, and they couldn't even show how pleased they were to have succeeded. IBM called a huge press conference, and the CEO turned up to make a speech. Well, he said, he couldn't see what the fuss was about. This was just a chess match between the best chess player in the world and... Garry Kasparov. Evidently, the "no crowing" rule didn't apply to people high enough up the ladder.

If you're a software engineer and dream of making history, Hsu's book is obligatory reading. Highly recommended.

...more

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Jun 27, 2011 notgettingenough added it · review of another edition

Shelves: haven-t-read-but

Wow. I think Hofstadter's thoughts (from NYT, 1996) are so way, way off on this:

Several cognitive scientists said Deep Blue's victory in the opening game of the recent match told more about chess than about intelligence.

"It was a watershed event, but it doesn't have to do with computers becoming intelligent," said Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of computer science at Indiana University and author of several books about human intelligence, including "Godel, Escher, Bach," which won a Pulitzer

...more

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Dec 08, 2015 Rodolfo Gutierrez rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Beyond Deep Blue is an interesting book with a first-hand look at the trials and tribulations of Deep Blue. The main appeal of this book is its author, Feng-Hsiung Hsu, who was of the lead developers of the Deep Blue computer. Hsu tells of Deep Blue's genesis as the computer Deep Thought, and the long road to beating the world chess champion. The author maintains an air of humor that is a breath of fresh air next to the sometimes stifling chess lingo. However, the author is a self-admitted ...more

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Aug 10, 2019 Dennis Littrell rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A thoroughly engaging and candid account

Taiwanese-born Feng-Hsiung Hsu has written a most engaging and readable account of how Deep Blue came to be, and how it defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in perhaps the greatest chess match of all time. I say "perhaps" because there are many who still consider the 1972 encounter at Reykjavik, Iceland between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky to be the greatest match ever. One thing both matches had in common, in addition to a worldwide audience, A thoroughly engaging and candid account

Taiwanese-born Feng-Hsiung Hsu has written a most engaging and readable account of how Deep Blue came to be, and how it defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in perhaps the greatest chess match of all time. I say "perhaps" because there are many who still consider the 1972 encounter at Reykjavik, Iceland between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky to be the greatest match ever. One thing both matches had in common, in addition to a worldwide audience, is two deeply suspicious and idiosyncratic geniuses, Kasparov and Fischer.

However, while Fischer's triumph rejuvenated interest in chess, especially in the US, Kasparov's defeat, many fear, may have rung the death knell for the ancient game. Before Deep Blue's victory, it was easy to imagine that the human mind was light-years ahead of any artificial intelligence. After Kasparov slunk off mumbling vague charges of human intervention ("cheating"), it became necessary to face the possibility that machine intelligence was on its way to exceeding that of humans.

But what did the match really prove? According to Hsu himself, the triumph of Deep Blue "might be the more important human achievement when all was said and done." (p. 256) By a "more important human achievement," he means, more important than the one that would have been Kasparov's had he won.

This I think is the crux of the matter. Deep Blue, an IBM computer of enormous power, is the product of human minds and human engineering. Look at it this way: as computers become more and more powerful and their algorithms become more and more sophisticated, there will no thought at all that a human might compete with them at chess. It would be like expecting the world's fastest human to beat a motor car in a race. Or for the world's best human calculator to add numbers faster than a personal computer.

In a deeper sense what was destroyed by this match was not human intellectual superiority but the delusion that somehow a board game--even the greatest board game ever invented--is a true measure of human intelligence. Quite simply, the ability to play chess at the highest level is only one talent, similar to (but different from) the ability to play the violin or to run fast. More significant is the greater human ability to conceive and build a machine that does something better than humans can do themselves.

Hsu's account includes a lot of information about his personal adventures in academia and the corporate structure, including rivalries with others in the race to build the ultimate chess-playing computer. He is candid, and self-revelatory to a surprising degree, and it is this candor that helps to make this a fascinating read, not only for computer specialists and chess players, but for anyone interested in how the human competitive spirit works. His portrait of Garry Kasparov--perhaps the strongest chess player of all time--captures the arrogant, suspicious genius at his most human and makes it clear how he came to lose a match he fully expected to win.

Ah, the match itself! The book includes the moves of the games in an appendix, but one can readily see that the match turned on two very strange decisions by the hitherto nearly invincible Kasparov. Strange to say, it appears that Kasparov lost the match mainly because of poor psychological decisions. In game two, believing that he was lost, mainly because he believed that the computer would not have made the move it had made had there been a perpetual check available to the human player that would have drawn the game, Kasparov resigned. However, the machine had erred, and there was a way to draw the game. Against a human opponent, I believe that Kasparov would have closely investigated that line and found the drawing resource.

In the final game again Kasparov made a decision based on what he thought was the nature of the way computers play chess. He allowed a sacrificial line as Black in the Caro-Kahn Defense, a line that he believed Deep Blue would never play since computers are notoriously bad at figuring out how to conduct a complicated attack. Indeed, commercial chess software for PCs typically exclude this line from their opening repertoire so as not to burden the program! So Kasparov thought in playing 7... h6 that Deep Blue would retreat its knight giving Kasparov easy equality. Instead Deep Blue plunged in with 8. Nxe6! Eleven moves later Kasparov resigned--easily one of the quickest defeats of his career.

So, with better decisions, based on sound chess and NOT on mistaken preconceptions about Deep Blue's prowess, Kasparov might have won the match. However, the irony is that it is unlikely that there ever will be another match between the world chess champion and a machine simply because Kasparov and the whole chess world know that the ultimate victory of machine over man, in the arcane test of will and calculation that is chess, is inevitable. But what we also know is that it doesn't matter. We still hold races between humans even though our machines can easily out distant them. And humans will continue to play chess even though they would have no chance against a computer because chess is first and foremost a human sporting event, a test of mental strength and skill much as a boxing match is a test of physical strength and skill.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
...more

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Oct 08, 2009 Nick Black rated it liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to Nick by: Manny Rayner

Amazon third party, 2009-10-08. Suffers from Smoot's Disease (see: Wrinkles in Time), but has its strong moments.

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Oct 04, 2015 Cormac Zoso rated it liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: computer geeks, chess fanatics

Recommended to Cormac by: online chess friends

Shelves: chess-general-varied-subjects

While this is an interesting book on the 'match of the century' and the development of the Deep Blue computer, it doesn't really address the problems with the match itself. There is a documentary, "Game Over - Kasparov and the Machine", that discusses the "questionable gamesmanship" of the IBM team (to put it nicely), namely, having approximately a dozen grandmasters in attendance in the locked and secured computer room where the real work of the computer hardware was happening. The team member While this is an interesting book on the 'match of the century' and the development of the Deep Blue computer, it doesn't really address the problems with the match itself. There is a documentary, "Game Over - Kasparov and the Machine", that discusses the "questionable gamesmanship" of the IBM team (to put it nicely), namely, having approximately a dozen grandmasters in attendance in the locked and secured computer room where the real work of the computer hardware was happening. The team member and the monitor out front on stage across from Kasparov was only a "dummy" terminal so to speak. The hardware was in a locked and guarded back room and this is where the moves were processed and made. (The IBM representative on stage only moved the physical chess piece according to what appeared on the monitor next to him.)

So why were there so many grandmasters hanging out in the machine-room? The only humans who need be in attendance there were IBM technicians. This is where the major problem begins with this, the second match.

All that was needed was someone to make the move for the computer and then the computer would automatically "think" and indicate its next move. The attendance of a group of grandmasters in that room can only lead one to suspect that a discussion was going on about the move and upcoming moves that Deep Blue proposed. A grandmaster, or even an international master or national master for that matter, with the help of Deep Blue (or even a very good commercial chess computer program such as Fritz) could beat a top player when working together.

The first game of the second match saw Kasparov easily defeat Deep Blue. The machine made many poor moves, what Kasparov described as "computer moves". Then suddenly in the second game, Deep Blue's expertise increased appreciably and it won the game. The next three games were draws and then Deep Blue won the final and deciding game.

How could the computer increase in skill so dramatically and almost literally overnight? And why were printouts of Deep Blue's move analysis never provided (as promised) following the match? IBM simply dismantled the machine, sending half of it to the Smithsonian and the other half being disassembled back at IBM.

Why dismantle the first machine to beat a grandmaster? IBM spent millions (I assume ... it was their "own" development costs but it couldn't have been cheap) on the development and seemed to think of it as nothing more than disposable, outdated digital hardware.

The reason that makes sense is that Deep Blue did its analysis and the group of grandmasters present in the secluded back room then analyzed Deep Blue's suggestions from there. If they saw a better move or line among the ones proposed by Deep Blue as it was "thinking", then they simply made that move rather than the move "honestly" compiled by Deep Blue.

The fact that Deep Blue played like a "patzer" in the first game and then overnight, with some sort of "tweak" by the IBM technicians, it suddenly started to play at a world class level just does not make sense. The technicians had every game Kasparov ever played (as well as millions of other games) to uae as a database while "teaching" Deep Blue as well as for an onboard database (or "book" as it is usually called for a computer chess program) for the machine to use during the match. Then why wasn't Deep Blue ready right off the mark in the first game?

A group of grandmasters assessing and assisting the computer is the most obvious answer.

In other words, IBM cheated and then immediately dismantled the machine so that there would be no future matches by which someone might figure out just how it was that they beat the highest-rated chess player (at the time) in the history of the game.

While computers now are be able to play at the top level this was nearly twenty years ago and that is a lifetime as far at digital technology development is concerned. Deep Blue's amazing jump in ability during this match was far too big in far too short a time.

Of course, these questions are not going to be discussed in a book which is basically one of those "look how smart I am" PR scripts and tells only IBM's side of the story.

My apologies if I am a bit terse but cheating is why I stopped watching sports also (steroids, human growth hormone, performance-enhancing drugs of all sorts). I don't know how these people live with themselves and how they can stand up in front of millions of people and lie and lie and lie about not cheating (think of Lance Armstrong). The human race would be a far better species if the natural ability of lying could be taken out of our DNA. ...more

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Oct 26, 2011 Ushan rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: engineering

Feng-hsiung Hsu was born in 1959 in Taiwan. After graduating from National Taiwan University with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, he served in the ROC Army for two years, and then was sent to the United States for graduate studies at Carnegie-Mellon University. For his thesis, Hsu was going to design a chip for improved printing of Chinese characters by laser printers; however, he went to a seminar about a specialized 64-chip circuit board for a chess-playing computer.and was approached by ...more

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Aug 09, 2016 Jared rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2016, biography, non-fiction, programming, science

This is the story of how humans built a machine that could outthink humans, at least in a narrow field.

The author was one of the creators of Deep Blue, the chess machine that beat World Champion Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. This book is the story of how the machine came to be.

One of the themes of the book is the struggle between man in his own abilities and man as tool maker. The insecurity of man when he considers his tools is evident in a lot of literature -- particularly science ...more

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Apr 23, 2012 Zoombini Pedicini rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Fantastic story about the underlying history culminating in the first machine able to defeat the world champion Gary Kasparov in tournament-style chess. Although I have some familiarity with computer science and chess, neither is required to enjoy this book. I also had no idea that Joel Benjamin assisted the IBM team with the project. Lots of details, and really interesting to note that the principal architect 許峰雄 is Taiwanese.

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Mar 16, 2013 Dean Tambling rated it liked it · review of another edition

Hsu isn't exactly a gifted wordsmith, and it would be nice to hear a little more about his ethos as a toolmaker and his thoughts on what was happening, and a little less about each and every single move from a particular chess game, but this remains a fascinating, enjoyably unvarnished look at the day-to-day machinations of pushing technology forward.

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Apr 08, 2007 Andi rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: CMU alums

The author is much too self-congratulatory for my taste, and the creation of a world-class chess-playing computer is less interesting than one might think. I finished the book with a feeling of "so what?".

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Jun 30, 2008 Bobsie67 rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: chess, philosophy-psychology-science, cyber

Makes you think that you migth actually undertsand how geniuses create a computer strong enough to beat the Chess World Champion. I liked reading about the battle of egos most of all.

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May 03, 2011 F. John rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This was very well-written. I was introduced to the world of computer chess. Gary Kasparov behaved like a bad sport in the end. I think he should have lost with some class.

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