Bulletin Autumn‧Winter 1995

Computer Chess Championship Held in Hong Kong for the First Time Tournament Shows the Potential of Computer Science The Eighth Computer Chess Championship was hosted by the University, in conjunction with the International Computer Chess Association, from 25th to 30th May 1995. This triennial competition was held for the first time in Asia, and had 24 participants from 10 countries. The objective of the tournament was to determine the best combination of computers and software programs that play chess. Fritz, a Dutch program that was th e first computer to defeat World Champion Gary Kasparov in a series of five-minute games, beat the tournament favourite — IBM's Deep Blue Prototype, by virtue of availing of its better opening game library. It went on to win the tournament by defeating Star Socrates — a powerful chess computer system developed by the MIT laboratory for computing science — in a one game play-off. By winning the championship, Fritz demonstrated that chess knowledge is perhaps more important than computing power. It used a standard Pentium 90mhz PC, one of the least powerful computers in tournament, as opposed to Star Socrates that was connected to the Intel Paragon parallel supercomputer in USA, which is 50 feet long, weighs 30,000 pounds, and has 1,824 processors, each with 16 or 32 Mbytes of memory! In the Saitek Challenge, i.e., the man versus computer matches held on 28th May, Hong Kong's six strongest chess players were pitted against the five leading chess playing computers of the competition, and a Saitek (a local manufacturer of computer chess machines) computer. The computers won by a resounding margin of 4.5:1.5 — they had three wins and three draws. This was no mean feat, considering the human team was no pushover. Fritz, Star Socrates, and IBM's Deep Blue were, in due order, the winners of the tournament that served to bring home the practical application of some of the remarkable human achievements in computer science. It gave the press and public in Hong Kong an opportunity to witness first-hand the migh t of artificial intelligence. To think that, while Kasparov would perhaps be looking at best at 20 to 30 positions ahead of the immediate one, a computer today would be looking a t millions! The tournament also put the University on the world chess map, and as was hoped, helped raise local interest in the game and in the potential of computer science. The championship play-off on 30.5.95 — Star Socrates vs. Fritz. World Computer Chess Championship Held in Hong Kong for the First Time 4