ICGA Tournaments

Deep Blue Prototype consists of an IBM RS/6000 workstation with 14 chess search engines as slave processors. Each processor contains a VLSI chip for move generation, as well as additional hardware for search and evaluation. Each Deep Thought 2 processor searches about 500,000 positions per second standalone, or about 400,000 positions per second as a slave processor. (This is about 1/10th of the projected speed of the Deep Blue single-processor currently in fabrication.) The 14- processor Deep Thought 2 typically searches between 3 and 5 million positions per second. When conducting a search, the search tree near the root position is processed on the host workstation, and includes selective search extension algorithms such as singular extensions. The deepest nodes in the search tree are handled by the slave search engines which usually do 4-ply alpha-beta searches.