Biographies Of The IBM Deep Blue Team

Chung-Jen (C.J.) Tan
Chung-Jen Tan is the senior manager of the Application Systems Technologies department at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He is also the manager of the IBM Deep Blue computer chess project.

Since 1984, he has been engaged in various activities for developing IBM's research programs in the area of architecture development and machine design for highly parallel scalable systems. His department was responsible for the architecture definition and instrumental in the design of the early versions of the IBM RISC System/6000 Scalable POWERparallel System (SP). For his research activities in parallel processing systems he was awarded an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award in 1987, and a IBM Research Outstanding Contribution Award again in 1994.

As part of the overall research activities in understanding how to effectively solve large complex problems with parallel processing computing systems, the Deep Blue project was started in his department in 1993.

C.J. is a member of the ACM, a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of the ACM Computer Chess Committee. He received a B.S.E.E. degree from Seattle University in 1963, and a Doctor of Engineering Science from Columbia University in 1969. He joined the IBM T.J. Watson on Research Center in 1969 as a research staff member, and has been involved in technical and managerial activities in the areas of design automation, optimizing compilers and parallel processing.

Murray Campbell
Murray Campbell is a research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He has been working on the Deep Thought and Deep Blue computer chess projects since joining IBM in 1989. Murray was awarded an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award for his contributions to the Deep Blue project.

Deep Blue and its predecessor machines have won many awards and distinctions: first computer to defeat a grandmaster in tournament play - 1988, the Fredkin Prize for the first grandmaster-level chess computer, the OMNI Challenge Prize, and first computer to defeat World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in a regulation game - 1996. The machines developed by Murray and his colleagues have also won numerous ACM International and World Computer Chess Championships.

Murray received his doctoral degree from the Carnegie-Mellon University School of Computer Science in 1987, for work on chunking as an abstract mechanism in solving complex problems. He received an M.Sc. in computing science in 1981 from the University of Alberta for his research in parallel game tree search. He also received his B.Sc. in computing science from the University of Alberta in 1979. Murray has been involved with computer chess research for more than 15 years. He is also an expert chess player as well as a former chess champion of Alberta. He has co-authored a number of papers on computer chess, including a Mephisto-award inning paper on selective search algorithms.

Feng-Hsiung (F.H) Hsu
Feng-Hsiung Hsu joined IBM in 1989 as a research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and is currently the principal designer of the Deep Blue chess machine.

He received a PhD in computer science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1989 for architectural work on chess machines and for work on parallel alpha-beta search algorithms. He is best known for his work on the chess machine Deep Thought, which won the Fredkin Intermediate Prize in 1988 as the first computer to achieve Grandmaster-level rating, and the Omni Challenge Prize in 1990 by defeating International Master David Levy. He is also the recipient of the 1990 Mephisto Award for his doctoral dissertation and the 1991 Grace Murray Hopper Award for his contributions to architecture and algorithms for chess machines.

His current research interests, besides "building the ultimate chess machine," include algorithm design, parallel software design, high performance system architecture, VLSI design and special-purpose computing.

Joseph Hoane, Jr.
Joseph Hoane, Jr. has been working on the software for Deep Thought and Deep Blue for five years at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. His previous efforts at IBM Research include work on RP3, a research parallel processor; network simulation for parallel processors to understand communication overhead; and a custom imbedded compiler for a database system. From 1984 to 1987, he worked at IBM, East Fishkill, on a custom wiring program for Multilayer Ceramic Modules.

He graduated in 1984 from the University of Illinois with a B.S. in computer science, and received an M.S. in computer science from Columbia University in 1994.

Joel Benjamin
Joel Benjamin, a native New Yorker, was born in Brooklyn, and is 33 years old. Today, Joel resides in Manhattan. In 1977, at the age of 13, Joel became the first person to break Bobby Fischer's record, becoming the youngest U.S. Master to that time. In 1980, he became an International Master. In 1985, Joel graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in history, and he became an International Grandmaster in 1986. In 1987, Joel became the first awardee of the Samford Fellowship as the most promising player under the age of 25 in the United States. Joel is a 3-time U.S. Junior Champion. He became U.S. Champion in 1987. Joel has participated in a record 15 consecutive U.S. Invitational Championships. He is a 5-time U.S. Olympic Chess Team member and 2-time medalist. He won 2 gold medals in the 1993 World Team Championship. Joel is also the 3-time defending champion of the Harvard Cup, in which Grandmasters play against chess computers. In his only regulation meeting against world champion Garry Kasparov at Horgen in 1994, Joel and Garry played to a draw. Joel appeared in the movie, "Searching for Bobby Fischer", and was named to the list of 50 smartest New Yorkers by New York Magazine in 1995. Joel worked briefly with the IBM Deep Blue team in their preparation for the match with Garry Kasparov in Philadelphia in February 1996, and has worked with the team coaching Deep Blue in preparation for the rematch since last fall.

Jerry Brody
Jerry Brody has been working on the Deep Thought and Deep Blue hardware systems for almost six years at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He joined IBM Research in 1978. Since joining IBM, he has worked on the Research Parallel Processor Prototype (RP3); the Yorktown Simulation Engine (YSE), a logic simulation machine; and the 801 machine hardware replication, IBM's first RISC processor. Jerry also worked (1978) on VS-4 hardware, a vector scan system that etched patterns directly on silicon wafers for submicron integrated circuits.

He graduated in 1959 from the RCA Institute in New York City, with an A.S. degree in television and RF theory.