Players get thrilled with computer games when the computer cooperates well or is reliable. And with plays like chess, they have to look if not for the best, the smartest chess computer. What is the smartest chess computer then?

Deep Blue is referred to be the one. Why? Is it because the machine won twice over the hailed world chess champion Garry Kasparov by a match comprised of six games on 1997? Is it why Kasparov had to accuse the creator of the machine of cheating and had to demand for rematch?

Deep Blue is a chess computer (one that that plays chess). It is a product of IBM. It has previous versions before it defeated Kasparov and one of which the grandmaster has beaten earlier in 1996.

The origin of the machine is traceable from Carnegie Mellon University where the project was conducted first by Feng Hsiung Hsu as a “Chip Test”. Deep Thought succeeded it and together with Thomas Anantharaman and Murray Campbell, IBM Research employed Hsu to create a chess machine to beat world champions. Arthur Joseph Hoane whose task is programming and Jerry Brody joined the team after Anantharaman left.

Deep Thought had a match against Kasparov in 1989 and after then, the chess machine was renamed “Deep Blue.” Grandmaster Joel Benjamin played with its scaled down version, the Deep Blue Jr., thereby IBM Research hiring him for the opening book assistance and preparation of the match against Kasparov.

For PR reasons, Deep Thought was renamed again “Deep Blue prototype” or Deep Thought II and it was played in the 8^th World Computer Chess Championship in 1995. Wchess was a computer program it played with and this resulted to a draw. It lost a match against the computer program Fritz and ranked second to another computer program Junior.

Under regular time controls, the so-called success of the chess machine Deep Blue was its victory against the world chess champion Kasparov in 1996. This made famous the game Deep Blue – Kasparov, 1996, Game 1. Nevertheless, Kasparov had a rematch with it and this concluded to two draws and three wins during the same year.

The machine was upgraded and then had an unofficial nickname “Deeper Blue”. The heavy upgrade resulted to another match with Kasparov in 1997. This match was known worldwide for the defeat of Kasparov under time controls of standard chess tournaments by a computer system.

The brute force computing power is where the main playing strength of the system derived. With a base system RS/6000 SP Thin P2SC having 30 nodes, it was massively parallel. Each node of the system has 120 MHz P2SC microprocessor equipped with VLSI chess chips for special purpose. The C-written chess program under an operating system called AIX, has the capability of evaluating positions reaching two hundred million per second, twice faster than the 1996 version. According to the Top 500 List, Deep Blue then became the supercomputer most powerful at 259^th after it has achieved 11.38 GFLOPS on the High-Performance LINPACK benchmark.

A depth of six to twelve plies is a typical search of the chess machine and sometimes, it’s maximized to forty. The playing strength is increased by 50 – 70 points with one additional ply according to Levy and Newborn.

A number of parameters to be determined comprise a generalized form of the evaluation function of the smartest chess computer yet. The determination of parameters is done by the system itself, usually by analysis..