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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."

5 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. And poor me by alexborges · · Score: 5, Funny

    I havent been able to beat gnuchess....:(

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    NO SIG
  3. One crazy scientist! by trippinonbsd · · Score: 5, Funny

    Look at that guy, he looks like a mad scientist.

  4. Computers will never beat us at... by Scrameustache · · Score: 5, Funny


    Twister.

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    You can't take the sky from me...

  5. Deep Blue was not dismantled by phr2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.