IBM Deep Blue shifted to museum

NEW YORK: The computer that beat chess champion Garry Kasparov five years ago and sparked a debate over the meaning of intelligence has become a museum piece. IBM said that it had donated one of the two refrigerator-sized computing towers that made up its Deep Blue supercomputer to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The computer, which had 500 microprocessors that were tweaked to perform a mind-numbing number of chess calculations, toppled Kasparov, the world's best human chess player, in 1997. After that, Deep Blue was used for research on databases at IBM's Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York for four years before being "retired last year."

In only five years, the technology used in Deep Blue has been far surpassed, replaced by smaller and faster microchips and components. It's not really feasible to run Deep Blue anymore, an IBM scientist said. Murray Campbell, who was one of the scientists who started working on designing a chess computer for IBM in 1989 and who now leads database research, said the work IBM began with Deep Blue didn't finish when it beat Kasparov.

"It made people realize that computers can solve really hard problems if you really apply them correctly. And there are plenty of hard problems out there in the world today," Campbell said. Campbell will visit Deep Blue in its new home, where it will be part of the permanent exhibition "Information Age: People, Information and Technology."

© Reuters