Textbook of AI

1959–, Computer scientist

Feng-hsiung Hsu is a Taiwanese-American computer scientist who, while at Carnegie Mellon and later IBM, was the lead architect of the Deep Blue chess computer. The CMU project began in 1985 with ChipTest (Hsu's PhD work, designed in three months for a six-month-deadline VLSI course); successive machines, Deep Thought (1988, the first computer to defeat a chess grandmaster in a tournament game), Deep Thought II, and finally Deep Blue at IBM (1996, 1997), refined the same custom-VLSI architecture into a 32-processor system evaluating 200 million board positions per second.

In May 1997 Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the reigning world chess champion, in a six-game match in New York. The result was world news and is generally taken as the moment that chess ceased to be a useful benchmark of human-vs-machine reasoning. The match was contested , Kasparov complained about restricted access to game logs and suspected human intervention in one of Deep Blue's moves, but the result stood. Hsu's 2002 book Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion is the standard account.