Newsgroups: comp.parallel From: eugene@george.arc.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya) Subject: Re: Dead Silence on Deep Blue? Organization: Nasa Ames Research Center Date: 28 May 1997 06:00:47 GMT Message-ID: <5mghmf$dp7$1@nick.arc.nasa.gov> In article <5met31$p6p@server1.ctc.com> Glen Clark writes: >I know that there is a lot of anti-IBM sentiment in these groups. >But I was surprised that there wasn't one peep here about >the Kasparov match either during or after. Knowlegable types may >consider it a non-event, as it only did what we all knew would >be done eventually. Even if you aren't an IBM fan or are one of >those who considers this a non-event, you have to know that it has >created among the lay public a lot of visibility (and credibility >since it won) for supercomuting. I think that it is far less a matter of anti-IBM sentiment than the reductionism inherent in Usenet news groups: rec.games.chess.computer: hundreds of articles and half a dozen other news groups on chess (cross-posts!). Also, chess is largely been seen as "an AI problem," and this news group also has tended to be slightly less AI oriented and more parallelism for numeric computing and simulation than AI, distributed problem solving, etc. So "talk about IT" here if you want to see discussion. You know how that works Glen; you've been here long enough to know that. >Recalling that Georgia Tech decided that "supercomuting" was >an anacronism when they unplugged the Cybers and that they >didn't forsee even needing anything bigger than a SPARC ever >again (this was about 1989 or so), I'm thinkful for any public >exposure that makes it harder for some non-technical administrator >to claim that supercomputing is a thing of the past. Supercomputing or parallel computing? What's problem with "non-technical adminstrators?" Elaborate. >While I doubt the Carnegie-Mellon cum Big Blue architects of the >programming are posting the source code on web sites, I would be >fascinated to know what little there they have divulged. Was it >simply a brute force, exhaustive search or were there AI elements >in its operation. I would also be interested if what effect (if >anything) others think this may have on the future. I will be at CMU in a week. Most of these programs tend to be brute force, after all, What constitutes AI? Stranger source code requests have appeared before. Many interesting CMU source code requests get made, but I thought this was more an IBM source code issue (and CMU is a private rather than public institution). CMU is a great place to see what's left of multiprocessors, a few robots, and cars which attempt to drive themselves. Ah for the days on the Usenet when the challenge of competitions like the above was then to post the source code for all on the net to run. No more. "If it ain't source, it ain't software." Favorite computer chess quote/story The only way Belle (computer chess machine) was going to hurt anyone was by dropping it out of a plane. --K. Thompson after Dept. of Commerce export control prevented him from taking his chess machine to Moscow. The unexportable component was the H-P 2640 terminal.