Bulgarian students take on supercomputer in chess match

Hi Everybody!

Here's news about what's Bulgarian Super Grandmaster Veselin Topalov has been doing after his recent World Championship with Viswanathan Anand: He has been organizing a chess match between Blue Gene/P of IBM (with 8192 processors!) and Bulgarian students. Topalov had also bought a mammoth computer cluster for his World Championship match.

A supercomputer versus students match (ending with a 2.5-0.5 result) was held recently at the IBM Bulgaria office under the patronage of Topalov, who arrived from Spain especially for the event!

The students' team included Stephanie Kovacheva, Todor Kossev and Kalin Zlatanski. Then world champion Gary Kasparov had taken on IBM supercomputer Deep Blue (a predecessor of Blue Gene / P) several years ago. Blue Gene/P is supposed to be four times faster than Deep Blue.

Тhe students played three games of blitz chess (5 minutes per game for each color) with white pieces against Blue Gene/P. They lost the first and the third game. During the second game, Topalov helped the students find a threefold repetition for a draw.

The chess match is the final part of the initiative 'Smart planet' supported by IBM and Topalov for raising interest among young people in high technologies and artificial intelligence. You can read a detailed press release about the event here. You can read more about Blue Gene/P here.

From Alexandra Kosteniuk's

www.chessblog.com

Also read my personal blog at

www.chessqueen.com