Deep Blue Team Wins, Again

The three men at IBM who created Deep Blue, the first computer to beat a world chess champion, received a cash prize earlier this week for their efforts.

Feng Hsu, Murray Campbell, and A. Joseph Hoane Jr. will split the Fredkin Prize, worth US$100,000, the Associated Press reported.

The Fredkin Prize was established at Carnegie Mellon University 17 years ago to be given the first time a computer beat a chess Grandmaster.

Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov on May 11 in the final game of a tied, six-game match. Kasparov had beaten the computer in a previous match, but IBM engineers fine-tuned the Deep Blue's processes for the rematch.

Kasparov declined to attend the award ceremony, held at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence's national conference, saying that he would be on vacation.