Photos: Chess supercomputer crushes grandmaster

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  • Chess supercomputer crushes grandmaster

    Chess supercomputer crushes grandmaster

    Chess grandmaster Michael Adams discusses his loss to Hydra, a supercomputer with the processing power of 200 million moves a second. He managed a draw in six games. According to the tournament site, Match Arbiter Albert Vasse said he's never seen a human play as well against a machine and conceded that humans don't stand a chance anymore.

    Caption by: Bill Detwiler

  • The Hydra chess supercomputer is a cluster of 16 nodes of four computers, with each node holding 32GB of memory. It lives in a server room in Abu Dhabi. For the match Hydra utilized 32 PCs running on Intel Xeon 3.06GHz processors.

    Caption by: Bill Detwiler

  • British chess champion Michael Adams studies the board in London's Wembley Conference Center in Game 3 of his six-game match against supercomputer Hydra. Adams, weary from his marathon match the day before, lost to the computer.

    Caption by: Bill Detwiler

  • In Game 2 of the six-game chess match, chess grandmaster Michael Adams and supercomputer Hydra played to a five and a half hour draw. Hydra won the first game.

    Caption by: Bill Detwiler

  • In Game 1, chessmaster Michael Adams tries to come up with a winning combination. Hydra won the game in just 33 moves.

    Caption by: Bill Detwiler

  • Chrilly Donninger (right), designer of the computer chess program Hydra, chats with U.K. chess grandmaster Michael Adams at a May 2005 press conference in London. Adams is playing a six-match chess tournament against Hydra for a $150,000 prize.

    Caption by: Bill Detwiler

  • Chess Grandmaster Michael Adams, the No. 1 ranked chess player in the U.K. and No. 7 worldwide, practices against a computer.

    Caption by: Bill Detwiler

  • Hydra's view of his opponent. The supercomputer was named after a seven-headed monster.

    Caption by: Bill Detwiler

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The United Kingdom's top chess player was soundly beaten by Hydra, a clustered system of 32 PCs.

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Chess supercomputer crushes grandmaster

Chess grandmaster Michael Adams discusses his loss to Hydra, a supercomputer with the processing power of 200 million moves a second. He managed a draw in six games. According to the tournament site, Match Arbiter Albert Vasse said he's never seen a human play as well against a machine and conceded that humans don't stand a chance anymore.

Caption by: Bill Detwiler

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