Finally happened -- a Computer Program (Deep Fritz) toasted the world Chess Champion in a six game match.
From the BBC:
Chess champion loses to computer
Deep Fritz, a chess-playing computer, has beaten human counterpart world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik in a six-game battle in Bonn, Germany.
Deep Fritz won by four points to two, after taking the last game in 47 moves in a match lasting almost five hours.
Of the six games, Deep Fritz won two and four ended in draws.
The 31-year-old Russian, who received $500,000 (£253,000) for playing the machine, could have walked away with double if he had been successful.
After the game, Mr Kramnik said he was "a bit disappointed" but hoped a rematch could be arranged in a year or two.
A bit more about Vladimir Kramnik:
In 2002, Mr Kramnik held Deep Fritz to a draw after eight games, but the chess software has since been updated, calculating millions of positions every second.
In October, Mr Kramnik defeated Bulgaria's Veselin Topalov to become the undisputed world chess champion for the first time since 1993.
Deep Fritz is an outgrowth of Deep Blue which ran on fairly proprietary IBM hardware. Deep Fritz runs on a single Compaq 8-processor box. I didn't know the platform until I checked for this post. I used to work at MSFT and managed hardware test labs. The Compaq 8-proc boxes are gorgeous pieces of engineering. Expect to pay about $75K on up for one with all the bells and whistles but you will have a computer that simply will not fail unless there is an Act of God.
I worked for a few years in a lab that tested the ability of Windows to scale to large enterprise environments. Any more than eight processors becomes a liability as Windows spends more time shuttling stuff around than it does computing. A Unisys ES7000 box with 32 processors costs about $2 Million. You can buy four Compaq boxes and a bunch of fibre hardware for interconnection for under $400K and have much better performance. Plus, if that Act of God happens and you loose one system, you are still up and running at 75% until you can get the replacement.
This problem is not just Windows though, it's all Operating Systems. Why does Google use so many single-proc machines when they are running Linux...
Please note -- there are some very specific reasons for getting the Unisys ES7000 system when you are running a very large business. One thing unique to the ES7000 is that it can be partitioned into up to eight segments so you can recover a lot of the system efficiency of the four and eight proc systems. You can also run multiple operating systems on the same box with zero problems. I worked with a few of these and the engineering on them is amazing -- Unisys was a major mainframe company and they brought all that is good about mainframes to the Intel platform and made an awesome machine!
