From: Pieter Stouten SHOGI NET> Date: 17 jan 2000 Subject: Deep Blue Shogi and Blue Gene On 00/01/10 at 20:39 -0500, Larry Kaufman provided us with the following quote from Feng-Hsiung Hsu (co-author of Deep Blue): >"The only chance that you would ever see the chess chip commercialized >would be if someday I decide to build a shogi chip. Then you might see a >new chess chip designed as a by-product. I would not hold my breath though. >I have some other interests that have higher priorities." > Maybe, these are his interests: IBM unveils $100 million research initiative to build world's fastest supercomputer: "Blue Gene" to tackle protein folding grand challenge On December 6, IBM announced a new $100 million exploratory research initiative to build a supercomputer 500 times more powerful than the world's fastest computers today. The new computer -- nicknamed "Blue Gene" by IBM researchers -- will be capable of more than one quadrillion operations per second (one petaflop). This level of performance will make Blue Gene 1,000 times more powerful than the Deep Blue machine that beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, and about 2 million times more powerful than today's top desktop PCs. Blue Gene's massive computing power will initially be used to model the folding of human proteins, making this fundamental study of biology the company's first computing "grand challenge" since the Deep Blue experiment. Learning more about how proteins fold is expected to give medical researchers better understanding of diseases, as well as potential cures. "This is exactly what IBM Research does best -- continuously placing big, aggressive bets on technologies that change the future of computing," said Dr. Paul M. Horn, senior vice president of IBM Research. "In many ways, Deep Blue got a better job today -- if this computer unlocks the mystery of how proteins fold, it will be an important milestone in the future of medicine and healthcare." [...]