Word: cray
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...weeks ago in Pittsburgh, Hitech finished first in a ten-team tournament that included four chess masters. Last week it made short work of three weaker machines before taking on the Cray. Two hours into that game, a crack opened up in the Cray's king-side attack, and the minicomputer swooped in for the kill. Says Robert Hyatt, chief designer of the losing program: "We were at its mercy...
...week for chess champions. As Anatoli Karpov was falling a game behind Gary Kasparov in the world chess championship at Moscow's Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, an upset of a different sort was taking place in Denver's Radisson Hotel. The world's top-ranked chess machine, a $14 million Cray X-MP/ 48 supercomputer running a program called Blitz, was about to lose the North American computer-chess championship to Hitech, a rack of custom-made silicon chips attached to a $20,000 Sun minicomputer...
While Karpov and Kasparov were face to face, the two computers were 750 miles apart--the Cray in Mendota Heights, Minn., the Sun on the Pittsburgh campus of Carnegie-Mellon University. The computers' moves were sent over telephone lines to Denver and relayed to a regulation chessboard. But distance did not hurt the game. Says Chess Master David Levy: "For the first time a program played like a strong human player...
Chess-playing computers generally use a brute-force approach. Looking four to eight moves ahead, they examine every possible play and counterplay and choose the move that minimizes their opponent's gain. The Cray, scanning 100,000 chess moves per sec., can usually come up with a winner. Hitech lacks the Cray's huge memory and powerful processors, but it makes up for that with speed and clever play. Long-term strategy, for example, is controlled by a program named Oracle, which was created by Hans Berliner, an artificial- intelligence expert and former world correspondence-chess champion...
...overall winner of this year's contest is Dan Cray, 18, of Wofford Heights, Calif., for his national-events entry, "Free Enterprise Reaches the Final Frontier," a 675-word story on the new business of rocketing the ashes of the dead into space. Cray, who graduated from Kern Valley High School in Lake Isabella, Calif., last week, is an aspiring journalist and plans to attend Santa Monica College...