F.H. Hsu on Deep Blue's chances of winning:
"I think last year, going into the match, we knew that the machine could search so many positions per second. Based on previous projections, we thought that we had a good chance to win. But to tell the truth, I did not really think we could win last year. This time I believe we can win. And that's a good feeling to have."

Back in 1985, a 22-year-old from Azerbaidzhan was playing a chess match in Moscow, Russia. He was about to become the youngest world chess champion in history. At the same time, across the Atlantic, a young doctoral student was working in the lab at Carnegie Mellon University, diligently constructing a chess-playing computer called Chiptest.

Eleven years later, their fates collided on a stage in Philadelphia in what the world champion later called "one of the most difficult matches of my career."

That world champion, of course, was Garry Kasparov. The doctoral student? It was IBM development team member Feng-hsiung Hsu, who in 1985 was constructing the chess-playing computer that would eventually become Deep Blue. Kasparov defeated Deep Blue last year in Philadelphia by a score of 4-2 in an exciting match that boasted one of the largest worldwide audiences for any chess event in history.

Hsu makes history
For Hsu, it was the culmination of 11 years of ground-breaking work on his chess-playing computer. And when Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in the first game of the match, Hsu realized that something special had just happened.

"Going into the match," said Hsu recently, "I had some apprehension. After game one, the feeling of apprehension went away because, yes, we made history there, and we knew we could compete." The victory in game one marked the first time that a computer had ever defeated a current World Champion under regulation tournament conditions.

Awards and honors
Hsu received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon in 1989 for architectural work on chess machines and research on parallel alpha-beta search algorithms. The year before, he won the Fredkin Intermediate Prize for constructing the first computer to achieve a grandmaster level rating.

He joined IBM in 1989 and continued work on his chess-playing computer, since renamed Deep Blue, with a team of IBM research scientists that included Murray Campbell and Joe Hoane. Jerry Brody, an engineer, and C.J. Tan, a senior manager of the Parallel System Platforms Department, later joined the development team.

Day-to-day
Hsu's day-to-day activities on the Deep Blue project include hardware implementation and testing, and the maintenance of the evaluation function. He looks forward to this year's rematch with Kasparov and feels that Deep Blue will be much better prepared to meet the World Champion.

"Last year the machine was barely completed," remarks Hsu. "We didn't have enough time to prepare the machine as far as giving it what is important in the chess world. And this match [we have] essentially taken the computer, the baby, to chess school, teaching the machine what's important, showing it the ropes and so on. And that's important. Right now, it appears that the new machine, the new program, is playing much better.

Other interests
Currently, Hsu's research interests, besides "building the ultimate chess machine," include algorithm design, parallel software design, high performance system architectures, VLSI design, and special purpose computing.