Feng-Hsiung.Hsu@VLSI.CS.CMU.EDU (12/17/88)
It is not official until USCF certified all the game results, but Deep Thought has now met all the requirements for the $10,000 Fredkin Intermediate Prize for the first chess computer to perform at over 2500 (actually the performance rating is about 2660, USCF scale) for 25 consecutive games. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Deep Thought played in the $130,000 Software Toolworks Championship which featured heavyweight players like former World Champion GM Mikhail Tal, the "Great Dane" GM Bent Larsen who was in top 10 of the World only a few years back, GM Samuel Reshevsky, GM Walter Browne, GM Tony Miles, GM Gruenfeld, GM Gurevich, and several IMs. Deep Thought scored 6.5 out of 8 to tie for first place with GM Tony Miles. This is the first time a computer being a co-winner of a tourament with over $100,000 prize fund, or for that matter, any tourament with GM playing (Deep Thought, being a computer, is not elligible to the tourament prizes.). GM Bent Larsen lost to Deep Thought in the third round to become the first GM to lose to a computer in a regular tourament. Larsen's 2560 FIDE rating makes him the highest FIDE rated player to ever lose to a computer. Deep Thought's 2745 (USCF scale) performance in this tourament is also by far the highest ever for a computer. (Note: USCF rating is usually inflated by about 70-100 points with respect to FIDE rating. Gary Kasparov, the reigning world champion, is about FIDE 2760, or about USCF 2830-2860.) The 6-month old Deep Thought has now played 42 rated games. It played against International Masters 7 times, and won 5, drew 2, no loss. It played International Grand Masters 3 times, and won 1, lost 2 (the loss against GM Lev Alburt was due to a bug that caused the machine to throw away a repetition draw). The Deep Thought team would like to take this opportunity to thank all those whose help and encouragement made this possible, particularly Lawrence Butcher, Stuart Cracraft, Jim Gillogly, Peter Jansen, Larry Kaufman, Kai-Fu Lee, Tom Mitchel, Raj Reddy, Danny Sleator, Ken Thompson, Hide Tokuda, John Zsarnay and our advisors, Roberto Bisiani, Ed Clarke, H. T. Kung, and Bob Sproull. The Deep Thought team includes: Thomas Anantharaman, Mike Browne, Murray Campbell, Feng-hsiung Hsu, and Andreas Nowatzyk, all with the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University.