Star-Socrates beats Grandmaster Sagalchik in Man vs. Machine Chess Match at UMBC
[Article by]
Alan T. Sherman
Faculty Advisor, UMBC Chess Club
Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department
"... In an exciting game that lasted over seven hours, IGM [International Grand Master] Gennady Sagalchik (USCF [United States Chess Federation] rating 2568---35th highest ranked player in USA) [and playing White] ... lost to a machine in 56 moves. [Approximately] one month earlier he had predicted that "it is unlikely that any computer will defeat a grandmaster this year." [February 18, 1995, at simultaneous chess exhibition at UMBC]
The victor was the 1800-node Intel Paragon supercomputer running *Socrates (pronounced Star-Socrates), an implementation of Don Dailey's Socrates chess program. *Socrates features a new massively parallel search technique developed at the MIT Lab for Computer Science. On the Paragon, *Socrates searches over two million chess positions per second. ..."
[Red italic characters placed within square brackets were added by me. The above article was printed in the Summer 1995 edition of the Maryland Chess Newsletter which is published quarterly by the Maryland Chess Association, 14919 Belle Ami Drive, Laurel, MD 20707]
