Hsu's chess chip: from ChipTest to Deep Blue
In June 1985 Carnegie Mellon graduate student Feng-hsiung Hsu set out to build a chess move generator on a single chip in the 3-micron technology available to universities. The first working chips arrived about ten months later; the chip produced up to 2 million moves a second, ten times the 64-chip module of the Hitech machine.
Why it matters
The strength of a chess program became a matter of hardware: the speed of searching positions, on which play depended, came from a purpose-designed chip rather than a faster general-purpose computer. From this chip a direct line runs through Deep Thought to the 480 chess chips of the Deep Blue that won a match against the world champion in 1997.
With the chip the program first searched about 50,000 positions a second; ChipTest played in the 1986 North American championship and, by AI Magazine, won it in 1987 with a perfect score. Deep Thought had two processors of 450,000 positions a second each, 700,000 together, and in November 1988, tying for first with Grandmaster Miles, beat Grandmaster Bent Larsen. The 1996 Deep Blue had 36 IBM RS/6000 SP nodes and 216 next-generation chess chips at 1.6-2 million positions a second each, 50-100 million overall. The 1997 machine had 30 nodes and 480 chips in 0.6-micron CMOS, about 1.5 million transistors each, 2-2.5 million positions a second each. By Hsu, sustained speed reached 200 million positions a second; by Campbell, Hoane and Hsu, in the 1997 match the average speed in searches longer than a minute was 126 million and the maximum sustained 330 million. What the record does not claim: the transistor count and die size of the 1987 chip; the IEEE papers were not read.