Deep Blue Junior

IBM Deep Blue Junior (DBjr.) is a portable version of IBM's advanced chess technology, Deep Blue. Deep Blue is the system which successfully played against Chess Grand Master Garry Kasparov in early 1996. Since DBjr. is a traveling version of Deep Blue, it is not nearly as strong as Deep Blue. However, it is still a very powerful opponent. There are several fundamental technology differences between Deep Blue and DBjr. Deep Blue uses parallelized software running on a 32-node RS/6000 SP* supercomputer. It has 16 specialized chess accelerator chips running on each node (a total of 512 accelerator chips) which boost its powerful performance. DBjr. is based on a single-node RS/6000 workstation, and uses a total of 16 chess accelerator chips. DB jr. also runs in a non-parallelized (serial) mode, meaning it does not divide the processing work up between processors; all of the calculations are done on a single processor. Using its 512 chips, Deep Blue examines and evaluates chess positions at a high rate of speed -- at an average of 200 million chess positions per second. DBjr., with 16 of the same silicon chess accelerator chips, is capable of examining an average of 10 million chess positions per second. This configuration means that Deep Blue is ten times faster than DBjr.

Even in this scaled-down form, DBjr. performs at the level of a Grandmaster player and has played very successfully against many formidable opponents. Using many of the same technology innovations of Deep Blue, and developed by the same IBM Research team, DBjr. has tested to be far superior than most other chess computers, with the exception of Deep Blue.