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Codename Brutus: Chess-Playing FPGA PCI Card 260

Posted by timothy from the talk-about-specialized dept.
rockville writes "Brutus, a FPGA add-in PCI card developed by ChessBase and Dr. Christian Donnegar, just dominated a strong field of human players at a tournament in Germany. It's the first serious chess-playing FPGA architecture since Deep Blue was disassembled after its victory over Kasparov in 1997. Pictures of the card and a short description are here."
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Codename Brutus: Chess-Playing FPGA PCI Card More

Codename Brutus: Chess-Playing FPGA PCI Card

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  • Et Tu Brute! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Now, maybe I can get my friends to stop planting knives in my back during chess matches... ..oh wait. Damn.

  • How long till.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RevJim ( 564784 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @06:59PM (#6739397) Homepage
    How long till chess players are banned from wearing watches, because Deep Blue et al will be shrunken to the size of a pea?

  • And poor me (Score:5, Funny)

    by alexborges ( 313924 ) * on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @06:59PM (#6739401)
    I havent been able to beat gnuchess....:(
    • Don't feel bad. I find it very hard to beat C64 Chessmaster 2000.

  • okay (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:00PM (#6739412)
    I for one welcome our new chess playing overlords!

    mod me -1 Redundant, dammit!

  • how about... (Score:2, Funny)

    by 1ridium ( 220238 )
    a beowulf cluster of em....

  • The Solution (Score:5, Funny)

    by John Paul Jones ( 151355 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:00PM (#6739417)
    Microsoft needs to offer something like this, offloading worm/virus processing from the CPU.

    I bet they'd make another billion.

  • Slightly Off Topic (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Davak ( 526912 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:02PM (#6739423) Homepage

    As the power of computer "thinking" increases, I personally believe that a computer will soon be able to beat any human player by pure power alone. Chess will fail to be dominated by people.

    But what stands in its place? Forever I have thought of chess as THE place where the mind can still beat the computer in a game environment.

    What will be the next challenge? Where is there a game that requires the uniqueness of human thought over the pure power of computer calculations?

    Davak

    • Re:Slightly Off Topic (Score:5, Interesting)

      by VistaBoy ( 570995 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:05PM (#6739446)
      The game of Go is extremely difficult to implement on a computer. I guess that's the next computing challenge.

    • Re:Slightly Off Topic (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Frostalicious ( 657235 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:08PM (#6739456) Journal
      Chess will fail to be dominated by people.

      I don't think there is an issue of who will dominate chess - man or machine. People play computers at chess for practice or fun, because people want it. Normal competitive chess will continue to be restricted to humans, as are most competetive games and sports.

      If there was some equal opportunity regulation for sports and games, the robots with the lazer beams would take over hockey, soccer, squash etc...

    • Re:Slightly Off Topic (Score:2, Insightful)

      by JExtine ( 691267 )
      Go and Shogi ("Japanese Chess") have proven difficult for computers to master, with "average" players able to beat computer programs with ease. The strategies of Chess are pretty well defined, with Grand Masters easily able to say why one move is better than another. With Go, players simply reply that a move "felt right". Computers are getting closer and closer to dominating Human competition in Chess, but there are still many games where they cant compete with the masters.
      • "The strategies of Chess are pretty well defined, with Grand Masters easily able to say why one move is better than another. With Go, players simply reply that a move "felt right"."

        I think you're misinformed. It is true that there are "players" who will respond that a move "felt right", and I am even one of those players who would respond that way in many cases, but I would also respond that way when explaining the reason I made a particular chess move - and I would estimate that my skill level in each g

    • Computers will never beat us at... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Scrameustache ( 459504 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:09PM (#6739465) Homepage Journal

      Twister.

    • Re:Slightly Off Topic (Score:5, Informative)

      by greppling ( 601175 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:10PM (#6739467)
      I am reluctant to give the answer, as every timechess programs come up on slashdot, someone has to make a post referring to Go:

      Computers are still very weak at this Asian board game. And despite many people trying to make substantial progress with that. The best open-source one, GNU Go, is btw not very far away from the best commercial ones.

      There is a Go Wiki with, among other things, a short introdcution [xmp.net].

      • on the other hand (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Trepidity ( 597 ) <[delirium-slashdot] [at] [hackish.org]> on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:21PM (#6739550)
        Most people are exceedingly bad at Go as well. The top Go players are invariably those who have been doing essentially nothing but playing Go since they were 3 years old, leading many to hypothesize that the root of good Go play is essentially astoundingly good pattern recognition.

        • As a (very low-level) Go player, everything I've seen, and been told by higher-level players, says that it's all about pattern recognition. By playing games upon games upon games, you apparently learn to recognize certain combinations of stones and the optimal sequences of moves from them. All the high-level players are very good at this sort of reading ahead, and it's how good you are at reading ahead that primarily determines your skill at such levels.

          Or so I hear, anyway.

    • Re:Slightly Off Topic (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Gherald ( 682277 )
      > What will be the next challenge?

      Solving the "problem" of chess for all possible solutions, of course!

      In particular, I'd like to see someone quantify exactly how much of an advantage White has if mathematically perfect moves are executed by both sides.
      • "In particular, I'd like to see someone quantify exactly how much of an advantage White has if mathematically perfect moves are executed by both sides."

        I think it would have to be "always wins" or "always loses", but I'm not sure how to prove it.
    • Trolling on /. ?

    • Re:Slightly Off Topic (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MagPulse ( 316 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:18PM (#6739523)
      The last games to be conquered by machines will be physical like soccer [robocup.org], or involve recognition of speech or visual information. Humans use their brains to their fullest in those activities; it's what they're best at compared to machines. When AI gets that far, if you believe in the Singularity [caltech.edu], we'll be at it.
    • What will be the next challenge? Where is there a game that requires the uniqueness of human thought over the pure power of computer calculations?

      Let's start with the simple game of "conversation", move quickly to "philosophy", and futher on down the line to "intuition". Hell, even "natual spoken language" is currently impossible for a machine.

    • Re:Slightly Off Topic (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tshak ( 173364 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:23PM (#6739563) Homepage
      But is it really the computer that's winning? It's one thing if all we do is give a computer the rules of Chess, and then see how it does. However, the computer is being told how to think and what to compute by humans. The computer is just automating (via opening/closing/midgame books, brute force, etc.) a human created algorithm. All that the computer has over the human is the speed of number crunching.

      • The computer that's winning, or the humans that ma (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Blue23 ( 197186 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @09:52PM (#6740546) Homepage
        But is it really the computer that's winning? It's one thing if all we do is give a computer the rules of Chess, and then see how it does. However, the computer is being told how to think and what to compute by humans. The computer is just automating (via opening/closing/midgame books, brute force, etc.) a human created algorithm. All that the computer has over the human is the speed of number crunching.

        It's an interesting point. Depends on what you define winning as.

        If you are comparing the ability of own human to do something unaided vs. the ability of another human to build a tool to do the same, then the tool builders win.

        If you are comparing chess skill, then the designers need not have more chess knowledge then the master, they just have a different way of approaching the probelm. In that case, as a matter of pure chess skill, hte master "wins" over the human designers.

        *shrug*

        I don't think the question is all that important, except to illustrate that "the computer" doesn't win, it's merely a tool.

        =Blue(23)

        P.S. Of course, the computer is your friend, keep your laser handy.

    • Re:Slightly Off Topic (Score:5, Funny)

      by El ( 94934 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:32PM (#6739614)
      Where is there a game that requires the uniqueness of human thought over the pure power of computer calculations?

      Computers have never done well on "Jeopardy"; they keep forgetting to "please phrase your answers in the form of a question."

    • What will be the next challenge?

      Art.

      This one's a Centrino Dali
      • Computers can already make art. There are neural nets out there that have been fed basic rules about a field of art (painting or music are two I have seen), then unleashed on the web. They create a piece or artwork and then have the results voted on by visitors to the sites, the nets use the results of those votes as fitness scores for the next generation of creations.

    • Re:Slightly Off Topic (Score:3, Interesting)

      by flooey ( 695860 )
      What will be the next challenge? Where is there a game that requires the uniqueness of human thought over the pure power of computer calculations?

      My first thought would be Diplomacy, since success in that game is based on communication, deal-making and -breaking, and manipulating others for personal gain.

      There is currently a Diplomacy AI project based on negotiation-free (nopress) play, but even that is far more difficult than chess since you have six other players and all seven players move simultaneo

      • Diplomacy (Score:3, Interesting)

        by alexo ( 9335 )
        > My first thought would be Diplomacy, since success in that game is based on communication, deal-making and -breaking, and manipulating others for personal gain.

        Which AI agents already do.

        > There is currently a Diplomacy AI project based on negotiation-free (nopress) play

        You're a bit behind the times.

        When I did my B.Sc. (85-88), there was a computerized Diplomacy game run by Sarit Kraus [biu.ac.il] that included AI agents as well as human players. All negotiantions were done on-line using a formal langua
    • Chess defied computers as real masters for so long because the problem space /used to be/ too large to take a good look at, so intuition and finely honed skills at determining positional strength (as opposed to just calculating plies of moves) kept the top humans the top of the field.

      However, as computers get more powerful, being able to look far ahead/prune less will slowly be able to simulate true positional understanding, because the computer will be able to "see" farther reaching strategies.

      That was t

    • Once upon a time, people used to have a thing that brains and brawn were of roughly equal value. Then, in the industrial era, smart people made machines to replace brawn. Now, smarter people are making machines to replace smart people, so, that brawny people won't need smart people any more.

      At the end of the day, we'll all be like John Henry, maybe beating this year's steam shovel and dying for it, but, next year, they will make a better model.
    • What will be the next challenge? Where is there a game that requires the uniqueness of human thought over the pure power of computer calculations?

      You're missing the point of games, which is what chess is, a means of entertainment for the players and in some cases spectators. We have machines that can lift many orders of magnitude more weight than any human, yet weightlifting is still a sport. We have machines that travel at 20,000 mph, yet running at 20 mph is still a sport. You can use a 10-megapixel ca

  • One crazy scientist! (Score:5, Funny)

    by trippinonbsd ( 689462 ) <(samchill) (at) (gmail.com)> on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:02PM (#6739426) Homepage
    Look at that guy, he looks like a mad scientist.

  • Finally... (Score:4, Funny)

    by wolrahnaes ( 632574 ) <sean AT seanharlow DOT info> on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:06PM (#6739449) Homepage Journal
    I was almost giving up on /.
    It's been days since we had an article about something that is really cool but useless for all practical tasks

  • FPGA HW linked like Voodoo 2 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A note from the webpage (before it gets slashdotted) on why this implementation is "better":

    "An additional benefit of using FPGAs is that it is not just the search routines that are speeded up dramatically. Due to the sturcture of the code you can add chess knowledge in any quantity without slowing down the process. In regular PC programs each new quantum of knowledge is expensive - it is bought at the price of search speed. The FPGA program does not slow down when you add new knowledge modules."

    Beyond sp
    • Hey, I actually removed a Voodoo 2 card that was hooked up to an old Diamond Stealth 2d card in an old computer of mine that was laying around about an hour ago!

      It was hilarious pulling it out and seeing the good ol' 3dfx logo stamped all over it...

      Um, nothing to say that's actually on topic...

  • Hmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by mkweise ( 629582 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:08PM (#6739457)
    Deep Blue was disassembled after its victory over Kasparov in 1997

    Kinda makes you shudder to think what they would've done to Kasparov if he had won...

  • FPGAs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Twillerror ( 536681 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:19PM (#6739529) Homepage Journal
    I think these are the coolest things to come around since high level languages.

    I've done some reading on VHDL and other languages used to program them. It would also be a fun hobby and a great way for open source to venture into the hardware realm.

    VHDL compilers are platform specific, so as the FPGA platform evolves the code written can be tweeked and recompiled to run faster on new chips. You could also take the compiled result and do additional tweeking to create an IC. It could also be possible to re-compile on the fly if the industry got standard enough, even running through an emulator if need be.

    FPGAs can even load new code as they are running, pretty fast to. So you could have librarys in memory and move them into the processors as they are needed. This allows for a much more complex program to be in hardware.

    Memory bandwith and memory in general seem to be some limiting factors, but are being addresses as they evolve. I think eventually they will be like a normal CPU, surrounding the FPGA.

    FPGA designs ( the fpga itself ) are usually a lot simpler then a normal CPU, so manufactoring them on smaller processes like 90 nm and lower will be easier, of course not a cake walk either.

    Check out http://www.xilinx.com for some products, they seem to be affordable for the average joe. I've read "Programmable Logic: PLDs and FPGAs" ( look on Amazon or your favorite reseller ), it was outdated, but a good introduction. There are some new books that I'm looking to get my hands on as well.

    I've done quite a bit of google searching, but haven't found a good "getting started with fpga" site. If anyone has some please reply with them.

    • Re:FPGAs (Score:4, Informative)

      by FunOne ( 45947 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:31PM (#6739611)
      VHDL the language may not be specific, but to properly use/take advantage of an FPGA architecure it must be specifically targeted. Writing VHDL for implementation ( and not just simulation) requires targeting the specific final implentation (FPGA, CPLD, VLSI) and even the specific brand/type/etc.

      FPGA designs require dynamic processes (so that they can be reprogrammed) and highly regular, repetative, and predicatable implementation. That does NOT make them easier to change process with. Unlike memory/processors that can be reclocked or relabeled, the FPGA needs to be as exact as possible to get proper functionality out of it.

      If you want a good "Getting started with Hardware Design" I suggest attending a university for a Computer or Electrical Engineering degree.

      Coding VHDL for HW implementation is NOT easy, its not just VHDL->Synthesis->DONE. There is tons of testing and retesting to determine if it synthesized right, if its timed right, if its functional under all inputs/circumstances. Getting a properly simulated and funciontal VHDL design (in the synthesizable VHDL subset that is) is only step ONE of a design. You then have to get a design that is still functional that will synthesize. Then you have to get a design that is still functional that synthesizes that performs correctly.

      Its not the kind of thing that you can learn in 21 days from a Sams publishing book.
      • Its not the kind of thing that you can learn in 21 days from a Sams publishing book.

        Damn!

      • Re:FPGAs (Score:3, Insightful)

        by seanadams.com ( 463190 ) *
        If you want a good "Getting started with Hardware Design" I suggest attending a university for a Computer or Electrical Engineering degree. .....Its not the kind of thing that you can learn in 21 days from a Sams publishing book.

        Get off your high horse, dude. It is NOT that hard to get started. With a good introductory book and a CPLD/FPGA demo board something like this [xess.com], it is quite possible for someone who has never done logic design to get up to speed and crank out a few simple working designs after a

    • Re:FPGAs (Score:5, Interesting)

      by seanadams.com ( 463190 ) * on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:53PM (#6739738) Homepage
      I have quite a few books on VHDL and logic design and this one is absolutely the best book for a beginner:

      Fundamentals of Digital Logic Design with VHDL [amazon.com]

      Based on little more than what I found in that book, I was able to implement my first chip, which is currently shipping in the SLIMP3 network music player. [slimdevices.com] Managed to fit the design in a small XC95144XL CPLD, which handles memory buffering, DMA transfer, IR capture, and serializing of data to feed to an audio decoder.

      It starts with the most basic building logic building block and boolean algebra, and moves step by step from there to a basic CPU. Very well organized and easy to follow, with excellent examples.

      Please DO NOT start with the Xilinx Foundataion kit and the examples therein. It will not make any sense. Actually it'll make even LESS sense to you if you have any software background at all.

  • Crafty. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Night0wl ( 251522 ) <iandow AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:20PM (#6739538) Homepage Journal
    This makes my thoughts return to Dr. Hyatt and his amateur program, Crafty. Under his personal operation he runs a copy on a Quad Xeon box, and apperently has been developing a Beo-Crafty rendition to play chess on a Beowulf cluster.
    It would be particularly interesting if this Beo-Crafty could be taylored to operate on a set of these cards. One nice hefty machine at the top level, and a slew of these PCI cards to do the real crunchy work.

  • Competition between chess systems? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I know Kasparov is smart, and I know most everyone can beat me at chess, and I know that most of these specialized chess things need a team of people just to operate, but how do they fare against each other.

    Like, if you put Deep Blue against Gnuchess... or even Sargon II on the Vic-20... would Deep Blue win *every single time* in a trouncing defeat? Would some programs give Deep Blue/Thought a real challenge or just a good run on a fluke of the random number generator?

    • Like, if you put Deep Blue against Gnuchess... or even Sargon II on the Vic-20... would Deep Blue win *every single time* in a trouncing defeat?

      It would depend on what conditions were imposed on timings. If you assume that each machine is allowed 5 minutes to think about each move, and that each game has (say) approximately 100 moves, then between the first and second moves, Deep Blue could model every single game that the VIC20 could possibly play and be ready for it.

      But if you set the game up so each

  • In the future... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Ugodown ( 665450 )
    I think that eventually, the question won't be if a machine can beat a human at chess, it will be who's computer can beat the other computer that can obviously beat a computer. And the pride will be in the design of the hardware and software that beats the reinging computer.

  • That card is way too big... (Score:3, Funny)

    by 403Forbidden ( 610018 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:27PM (#6739589)
    que the anti-voodoo5 and anti-geforce5800 zealiots.

    "but but but.. it takes an ENTIRE PCI slot... where will i put my porn stash now?"

  • Deep Blue was not dismantled (Score:5, Informative)

    by phr2 ( 545169 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:28PM (#6739593)
    It's in the Smithsonian and the hardware is more or less intact. It's in the typical condition of a decommissioned computer, i.e. you can't just flip a switch and start using it, but there's some chance that the folks who built it could get it working again sometime. This is described in the book "Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion" by Deep Blue's designer F.-H. Hsu. Hsu later got interested in building a Shogi (Japanese chess) machine using FPGA's. He says with today's custom VLSI, the equivalent of Deep Thought could be built on one chip and mounted in a compact flash card. You'd put the card into your Zaurus or Ipaq PDA and have a grandmaster-strength pocket chess machine. He put some effort into commercializing such a device but couldn't get enough backing so he went off to greener pastures.

  • Its not about playing games (Score:3, Informative)

    by oolon ( 43347 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @07:34PM (#6739624)
    Chess grandmasters do not tune their skills by playing lots of games, how could the best player ever get better? The interesting part only occurs in the middle game. Most GMs learn by reading books and replaying of important games. Its about seeing the pattern and knowing how to counter it. This is exactly the kind of thing computers are good at. They don't have to be taught how to understand the game or how to put to getter some new stratagy, just want to do when something happens. This is why Gary Kasparov was so upset at loosing, the computer had been programmed to recognise all know plays and knew how to counter them. So it simply waited for Gary to make a mistake.

    James

    • Chess grandmasters do not tune their skills by playing lots of games ... Most GMs learn by reading books and replaying of important games.

      What?!?! This is blatantly incorrect. Many of the world's top Grand Masters have accounts on ICC [chessclub.com] and play a lot. Certainly GM Alexei Shirov (currently ranked 7th in the world) GM Nigel Short (past World Championship candidate, and ranked 16th in the world) and GM Zong Zhang (ranked 33rd in the world) are known to regularly play lots and lots of blitz games on ICC to ke

  • dominated a strong field of human players at a tournament in Germany

    While I'm sure it's a good program, none of the humans was in the top 100 [fide.com] human players.

    That said, it is almost certain that computers will dominate humans in chess at some point.

  • How long before an FPGA is standard issue on motherboards? From Photoshop filters, to Audio work, this could be something very, very powerful.

    IBM Mainframes have enormous abilities to work with data with very little in the way of MIPS. They do this by having processors that can do math on data going over I/O channels without the CPU ever dealing with it. A motherboard FPGA, programmed at the application level could change the way we think about computing, allowing us to deal with data, treating it as signa
    • Never, most of those instructions are used too infrequently and not repeated enough for FPGA's to be a good fit. The reconfigure times are just too high. The more general purpose SIMD instructions on most modern processors are good enough for most media work.
    • 3-D Holographic Clippy?

      If you can think of a good pr0n application, I am sure there is plenty of capital for your application/idea in xxx-land
  • Karpov saw this coming and competitive as he is, one day he asked me to try to fold him down to PCI form size. This was the first time in my life that knowing origami helped and although his ears were a big problem, somehow I managed to fold him down to PCI form size. OMG, he's still in PCI slot 5! No wonder I'm so good at Quake all of a sudden. Hmm, I wonder if I should get a heatpipe for him.
  • As an at least average chess player, I feel that the better the computer, the better for me. BTW, by average I mean I win as often as I lose. I usually lose when I play the computer. Yet that is not the only reason, or even the best reason to teach a computer to play chess.

    Even better than playing a computer, is using the computer to analyze the game afterwards. The best way to get better is to learn from your own mistakes and those of your opponents. By having a stong, even grand master level, comput

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