Puny human takes on chess-playing supercomputer
By Lucy Sherriff
Published Tuesday 24th May 2005 15:37 GMT
The credibility of the human race is on the line, as a new six match man vs. machine chess tournament is announced in London. From 21-26 June, Hydra, the most powerful chess-playing computer ever built, will take on the rather puny-by-comparison UK chess Grandmaster, Michael Adams at the Wembley Centre. A purse of £80,000 is up for grabs, but more than that: the reputation of the species is on the line.
Hydra is really quite whizzy, for a piece of computer kit. It can analyse up to 200 million chess moves per second, and plan 18 to 40 moves ahead, that is six more than IBM's Deep Blue, for those who like to keep track of these thing. The machine's computational power can also be turned to DNA or fingerprint matching (one second to match a finger print in a database of 60 million), code breaking (can calculate every prime number between one and a sextillion in just five minutes), space travel and complex system calculations.
from The Register