Deep Thought (chess computer)

Deep Thought was a chess computer that was developed by Feng -hsiung Hsu at Carnegie Mellon University. He was named after the fictional computer Deep Thought in Douglas Adams ' novel series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The first version was created in May 1988, a preliminary version was chip test the name. The development of the program by IBM was under the name of Deep Blue.

Deep Thought won the North American Computer Chess Championship in 1988 and the Computer Chess World Championship in 1989. Headlines made ​​Deep Thought in 1988 by a split 1st place in the Open from Long Beach, California, where the program was able to win a game against grandmaster Bent Larsen, to this time was ranked 96 in the world rankings. It ran on a Sun 4 workstation and was about 720,000 positions per second calculated. In 1989, Deep Thought lost two games against Garry Kasparov and a correspondence chess game against Michael Valvo, but was able to win a tournament game against Robert Byrne and defeated International Master David Levy in a competition clearly 4-0.

The naming of chess programs was later followed the example Deep Thoughts ( such as Deep Blue, Deep Fritz and Deep Junior).