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Codename Brutus: Chess-Playing FPGA PCI Card
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."
How long till chess players are banned from wearing watches, because Deep Blue et al will be shrunken to the size of a pea?
I havent been able to beat gnuchess....:(
NO SIG
I for one welcome our new chess playing overlords!
mod me -1 Redundant, dammit!
I bet they'd make another billion.
Feh.
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
Look at that guy, he looks like a mad scientist.
I was almost giving up on /.
It's been days since we had an article about something that is really cool but useless for all practical tasks
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Deep Blue was disassembled after its victory over Kasparov in 1997
Kinda makes you shudder to think what they would've done to Kasparov if he had won...
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Twister.
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
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
It's in the Smithsonian and the hardware is more or less intact. It's in the typical condition of a decommissioned computer, i.e. you can't just flip a switch and start using it, but there's some chance that the folks who built it could get it working again sometime. This is described in the book "Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion" by Deep Blue's designer F.-H. Hsu. Hsu later got interested in building a Shogi (Japanese chess) machine using FPGA's. He says with today's custom VLSI, the equivalent of Deep Thought could be built on one chip and mounted in a compact flash card. You'd put the card into your Zaurus or Ipaq PDA and have a grandmaster-strength pocket chess machine. He put some effort into commercializing such a device but couldn't get enough backing so he went off to greener pastures.
VHDL the language may not be specific, but to properly use/take advantage of an FPGA architecure it must be specifically targeted. Writing VHDL for implementation ( and not just simulation) requires targeting the specific final implentation (FPGA, CPLD, VLSI) and even the specific brand/type/etc.
FPGA designs require dynamic processes (so that they can be reprogrammed) and highly regular, repetative, and predicatable implementation. That does NOT make them easier to change process with. Unlike memory/processors that can be reclocked or relabeled, the FPGA needs to be as exact as possible to get proper functionality out of it.
If you want a good "Getting started with Hardware Design" I suggest attending a university for a Computer or Electrical Engineering degree.
Coding VHDL for HW implementation is NOT easy, its not just VHDL->Synthesis->DONE. There is tons of testing and retesting to determine if it synthesized right, if its timed right, if its functional under all inputs/circumstances. Getting a properly simulated and funciontal VHDL design (in the synthesizable VHDL subset that is) is only step ONE of a design. You then have to get a design that is still functional that will synthesize. Then you have to get a design that is still functional that synthesizes that performs correctly.
Its not the kind of thing that you can learn in 21 days from a Sams publishing book.
FunOne
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.
But is it really the computer that's winning? It's one thing if all we do is give a computer the rules of Chess, and then see how it does. However, the computer is being told how to think and what to compute by humans. The computer is just automating (via opening/closing/midgame books, brute force, etc.) a human created algorithm. All that the computer has over the human is the speed of number crunching.
It's an interesting point. Depends on what you define winning as.
If you are comparing the ability of own human to do something unaided vs. the ability of another human to build a tool to do the same, then the tool builders win.
If you are comparing chess skill, then the designers need not have more chess knowledge then the master, they just have a different way of approaching the probelm. In that case, as a matter of pure chess skill, hte master "wins" over the human designers.
*shrug*
I don't think the question is all that important, except to illustrate that "the computer" doesn't win, it's merely a tool.
=Blue(23)
P.S. Of course, the computer is your friend, keep your laser handy.
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.