NEWS IN BRIEF: Rice students compete to earn match against Big Blue

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The winning Rice student will play the "baby" blue version of the Deep Blue via network connection to a system at IBM in New York on March 18.

Subsequently, the qualified student will go into a side room and begin playing. This match will be displayed on television monitors or projected onto a large screen in the Main Hall.

The match is meant to be a demonstration. According to Anthony Elam, executive director of Computer and Information Technology Institute, the "baby" blue version of the IBM Chess Machine will provide a very competitive game, although not as challenging as the original machine.

The Deep Blue recently made history by becoming the first computer to beat the human world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in a regulation game. Although Kasparov came back to win the 6-game match, the IBM Deep Blue system demonstrated that a sophisticated chess system can be developed using the IBM RS6000/SP parallel processor, which meets a long-standing challenge in computer science.

Preceding this chess match, Cung-Jen Tan, the head of the Deep Blue computer chess project at IBM, will give a lecture at 4 p.m. in Duncan Hall.

In his talk, Tan will describe the architecture of the Deep Blue system and illustrate the strong and weak points of Deep Blue through highlights of the match. The discussion will also focus on the implications of the event on chess and technology.

Tan's department was responsible for the architecture definition and was instrumental in the design of the IBM parallel processors SP1 and SP2. He is also the manager for the IBM Deep Blue computer chess project.

Tan's responsibilities include research programs in the area of architecture development and machine design for highly parallel scalable systems.

For more information, contact either Rice Chess Club Student President Brian Rothbach (send e-mail to rothbach@owlnet.rice.edu ), or Associate Psychology Professor Dr. David Lane at lane@rice.edu (ext. 3412).

This item appeared in the News section of the February 14, 1997 issue.

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