Robotic Nation Evidence

ChessBrain Community :: We did it!!!

From the article:

ChessBrain has become the first Distributed Computing network to play an actual game against a single human opponent. Over two thousand computers (2070) participated during the game! Our prior record involved only 846 machines.

From the ChessBrain site:

The ChessBrain project is devoted to exploring distributed computing using the ancient but still vibrant game of Chess. On January 30th 2004 ChessBrain made history by becoming the first distributed network to play a game against a single human opponent.

Since 1950 or so (see this chronology), people have been predicting that computers would be able to beat human beings at chess. It took perhaps 40 years, but this did come to pass. In the 1990s, personal computers became fast enough that chess software could beat many human players. However, Grand Master players could easily defeat simple chess software.

It took a team of people at IBM and millions of dollars in equipment to develop a chess computer that could compete with the best human players. But in 1997, the computer named Deep Blue was able to defeat Garry Kasparov in a well-publicized match. IBM discusses the Deep Blue machine on this page:

IBM has designed a system that can search through a century of chess moves at speeds up to four hundred million positions per second. But why build a system that plays chess? Other than Kasparov, who would be interested in such a computer?

By learning from a "friendly" chess match -- an extremely complex and strategic game -- the computer playing against Kasparov may be programmed to solve complex but common problems which, historically, have been very costly in terms of both time and money. The technology developed by the Deep Blue experiment explores a new computing paradigm: combining both specialized software and hardware with general purpose machines to more effectively tackle problems. The power behind Deep Blue is an IBM RS/6000* SP* system, finely tuned with customized processor chips designed by IBM Research. This combination, in addition to expert knowledge, enables users to take on larger problems by analyzing a greater number of possible solutions. As a result, industries from express shipping and air transportation to health insurance, financial investment, cosmetics manufacturing and retail distribution could benefit from the Deep Blue system architecture.

The ChessBrain project takes a completely different approach. It is using CPU time from normal computers "donated" by people around the world. The software distributes the processing load of a chess game across those thousands of computers. The advantage of this approach is that the ChessBrain project can amass a very large amount of computing power when necessary from its network of donors. The other advantage, of course, is that this distributed chess computer is free.

The ChessBrain project also shows that, perhaps in 20 years, a desktop PC costing $500 will be able to beat the best human players. In 20 years, a single desktop machine will have the power of the thousands of computers in today's ChessBrain project.

Chess is a very complicated game, but computer scientists understood how to create a chess-playing computer decades ago. Then they simply had to wait as the computer hardware got more and more and more powerful. Eventually there was enough CPU power available for chess computers to beat the best human players.

In that same way, we will be able to wait 30 to 40 years or so and we will have $500 desktop computers that have the CPU power of the human brain. It just will not be that long. Then, 20 years later, a desktop machine will have the power of 1,000 human brains. 20 years after that, a desktop machine will have the power of 1,000,000 human brains, and so on. This CPU power will fuel the robotic revolution. See Robotic Nation for details.