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Codename Brutus: Chess-Playing FPGA PCI Card

Posted by timothy on from the talk-about-specialized dept.

rockville writes "Brutus, a FPGA add-in PCI card developed by ChessBase and Dr. Christian Donnegar, just dominated a strong field of human players at a tournament in Germany. It's the first serious chess-playing FPGA architecture since Deep Blue was disassembled after its victory over Kasparov in 1997. Pictures of the card and a short description are here."

8 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. How long till.... by RevJim · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How long till chess players are banned from wearing watches, because Deep Blue et al will be shrunken to the size of a pea?

  2. Slightly Off Topic by Davak · · Score: 4, Interesting


    As the power of computer "thinking" increases, I personally believe that a computer will soon be able to beat any human player by pure power alone. Chess will fail to be dominated by people.

    But what stands in its place? Forever I have thought of chess as THE place where the mind can still beat the computer in a game environment.

    What will be the next challenge? Where is there a game that requires the uniqueness of human thought over the pure power of computer calculations?

    Davak

    1. Re:Slightly Off Topic by VistaBoy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The game of Go is extremely difficult to implement on a computer. I guess that's the next computing challenge.

    2. Re:Slightly Off Topic by MagPulse · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The last games to be conquered by machines will be physical like soccer, or involve recognition of speech or visual information. Humans use their brains to their fullest in those activities; it's what they're best at compared to machines. When AI gets that far, if you believe in the Singularity, we'll be at it.

    3. Re:Slightly Off Topic by flooey · · Score: 3, Interesting

      What will be the next challenge? Where is there a game that requires the uniqueness of human thought over the pure power of computer calculations?

      My first thought would be Diplomacy, since success in that game is based on communication, deal-making and -breaking, and manipulating others for personal gain.

      There is currently a Diplomacy AI project based on negotiation-free (nopress) play, but even that is far more difficult than chess since you have six other players and all seven players move simultaneously. As well, since there are six other players, often times it will be in a player's best interest to forgo an opportunity to better one's own position in favor of an ally. When those times are, how you can tell who your allies are (and decide who they should be), and how to use those to decide on a "best" set of moves from a set much larger than the set of legal chess moves appears to be quite a challenge.

  3. Crafty. by Night0wl · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This makes my thoughts return to Dr. Hyatt and his amateur program, Crafty. Under his personal operation he runs a copy on a Quad Xeon box, and apperently has been developing a Beo-Crafty rendition to play chess on a Beowulf cluster.
    It would be particularly interesting if this Beo-Crafty could be taylored to operate on a set of these cards. One nice hefty machine at the top level, and a slew of these PCI cards to do the real crunchy work.

    --
    Computational Madness in a round package.
  4. on the other hand by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Most people are exceedingly bad at Go as well. The top Go players are invariably those who have been doing essentially nothing but playing Go since they were 3 years old, leading many to hypothesize that the root of good Go play is essentially astoundingly good pattern recognition.

    --
    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  5. Re:FPGAs by seanadams.com · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have quite a few books on VHDL and logic design and this one is absolutely the best book for a beginner:

    Fundamentals of Digital Logic Design with VHDL

    Based on little more than what I found in that book, I was able to implement my first chip, which is currently shipping in the SLIMP3 network music player. Managed to fit the design in a small XC95144XL CPLD, which handles memory buffering, DMA transfer, IR capture, and serializing of data to feed to an audio decoder.

    It starts with the most basic building logic building block and boolean algebra, and moves step by step from there to a basic CPU. Very well organized and easy to follow, with excellent examples.

    Please DO NOT start with the Xilinx Foundataion kit and the examples therein. It will not make any sense. Actually it'll make even LESS sense to you if you have any software background at all.