C.J. Tan on last year's match:
"It was exciting, although stressful.. a lot of fear and
excitement all rolled into one. And at the first game, before the first game,
we really didn't know whether this whole thing we had put together would
work. Not only did it work, but we defeated Kasparov. After that you really
don't care whether you win the rest of them."
The primary spokesman and resident philosopher of the Deep Blue development
team, C.J. Tan has seen his fair share of innovations during his 28 years at
IBM. Tan joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in 1969 as a Research
Staff Member and is currently the senior manager of the Parallel System
Platforms Department.
"When I was in college, we were using the 7090s in graduate school, even
before the 360," remembers Tan. "So it was very exciting when I came to IBM
to see all the new generations of computers in development."
Tan received a BSEE degree from Seattle University in 1963 and a Ph.D. in
Engineering Science from Columbia University in 1969. He joined the Deep Blue
development team in the spring of 1992, inheriting the role of project
supervisor from Randy Moulic.
The evolution of Deep Blue
Deep Blue has come a long way in the past five years, and Tan has been an
instrumental part of its evolution. He views the Deep Blue project as a
gateway to a future where computers will allow humans to expand their natural
abilities.
In fact, says Tan, computers are "tools that allow us to extend our
capabilities. It's like a car. Automobiles allow us to run faster. Airplanes
allow us to go places. And this demonstrates that technology has matured to a
point where you can go beyond that. You can go into the consumer world, go
into the home, the school, even arts, and almost everything we do in the next
century will involve the computer as part of our tool kit."
Tan's relationship with Kasparov
While Tan has an amiable relationship with Garry Kasparov, he also sees their
association as that of a "friendly rivalry." Tan certainly respects the world
champion's abilities at the chessboard, but there is also a measure of
competitiveness that exists between the two.
But this makes sense, because both Kasparov and Tan want to win. "In sport,
there is always some element of competition. That's part of the fun. I think
both of us want to win. And that will make this more of a true test as to how
the technology has progressed to this point."
Tan also knows that Kasparov utilizes PC programs every day and that he is
preparing for his rematch with Deep Blue by playing against highly rated
chess-playing computers. Highly rated, that is, but not nearly as powerful as
Deep Blue.
Other interests
Other interests Besides his Deep Blue development responsibilities at IBM,
Tan is also involved in research programs in the areas of architecture
development and machine design for highly parallel scalable systems. His
department was responsible for the communication subsystem architecture
definition and instrumental in the design of the IBM RISC System/6000
Scalable POWERparallel Systems SP.
Tan is also a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE
and the ACM Computer Chess Committee.
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