DarkThought at 1st Karlsruher UniSchau (June 1997)

On June 7, 1997 during the first ``Karlsruher UniSchau'' (a public university show day), DARKTHOUGHT played an exhibition match against the official student chess team from the University of Karlsruhe. While facing strong opposition by Steffen Birk (ELO 2305), Volker Duschek (ELO 2245), Boris Kargoll (ELO 2245), and Volker Klein (ELO 2225), DARKTHOUGHT won the match 3.0:1.0 without loosing any of the four 60-moves-in-60-minutes games.

This man vs. machine event took place shortly after the ``IBM Deeper Blue vs. Garry Kasparov'' rematch and drew a crowd of knowledgable spectators who were fascinated by repeated high-quality play on all four boards. Interestingly, DARKTHOUGHT ran on slower computers in the games it won than in the games it only drew! Playing the white pieces, DARKTHOUGHT used one 433MHz Alpha-21164a workstation with 1MB off-chip L3 cache and one 300MHz Alpha-21164 workstation with 2MB off-chip L3 cache. Playing the black pieces, however, it used two 500MHz Alpha-21164a workstations with 1MB off-chip L3 cache as provided by Digital Equipment Corp. under external technology research contract DE-0032-97. Main memory amounted to 128MB RAM for each machine.



 

Created by Ernst A. Heinz, Thu Dec 16 23:28:11 EST 1999