"Deep Blue Revealed: The Journey in Pursuit of the Holy Grail of Artificial Intelligence

Author: (USA) Fengxiang Xu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features: On May 11, 1997, hundreds of millions of people around the world watched a stunning victory on television—the computer Deep Blue defeated Kasparov, who was defending his world championship title, shocking the international chess community. The author of this book, Fengxiang Xu, is the system designer of Deep Blue. He avoids complex technical terms and uses a conversational, non-technical tone to introduce the story behind the two historic matches between Deep Blue and Kasparov, revealing how an inconspicuous student project was eventually transformed into a multimillion-dollar supercomputer: the formation of scientific creativity, overcoming numerous technical obstacles, the competition and fierce disputes during the development of the chess-playing machine, and ultimately defeating the greatest human chess player in the world.
As early as 1949, there were scientific concepts about creating modern chess-playing machines, and developing a machine capable of defeating any human chess player has been one of the oldest holy grails in the field of artificial intelligence. Fengxiang Xu began his pursuit of the holy grail in the mid-1980s while studying as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. It was only when he and his partners continued the project at IBM and developed Deep Blue that this exploration truly came to fruition.
Fengxiang Xu vividly describes the tense atmosphere of this battle of minds and nerves—the "burning flame" in Kasparov's eyes. This book is not just another story about the human-machine showdown. It also illustrates how gifted humans—humans as toolmakers—allow their thoughts to roam far and wide.