What was the first chess engine that could beat the world chess champion when running on a standard desktop playing at standard speeds (i.e. not blitz chess)? For concreteness, say a $1000 PC.
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Deep Blue was a super computer. In the 2006 match, Kramnik was defeated by Deep Fritz that everybody could buy.
In a November 2006 match between Deep Fritz and world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik, the program ran on a computer system containing a dual-core Intel Xeon 5160 CPU, capable of evaluating only 8 million positions per second, but searching to an average depth of 17 to 18 plies in the middlegame thanks to heuristics; it won 4–2.[31][32]
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4The comparison between a 1997 supercomputer and a 2006 standard machine isn't necessarily trivial. – Inertial Ignorance Feb 3 '19 at 23:20
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3@InertialIgnorance I don't know but I am sure you couldn't afford IBM Deep Blue. – SmallChess Feb 3 '19 at 23:23
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2True, but I'm talking about the comparison between computational speeds. A mobile phone today is much faster than a supercomputer in the 50's, even though the latter costed way more at the time. – Inertial Ignorance Feb 3 '19 at 23:25
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5@InertialIgnorance A mobile phone today would have made the supercomputer TOP 500 list in the mid 1990s, nevermind the 1950s! – J... Feb 4 '19 at 13:05
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2For reference, Deep Blue was evaluating 100 million (first version) to 200 million (updated) positions per second, but to a depth of only 6-8moves on average (to a max of 20 in some cases). Deep Fritz had better heuristics, allowing it deeper searches with fewer evaluations. – J... Feb 4 '19 at 13:13
A standard desktop today is significantly more powerful than whatever machine Deep Blue was running on in the mid-1990s against Kasparov. Since Deep Blue was the first engine to beat a world champion, that's the answer to your question.
Note that there may have been an engine before Deep Blue that, if it ran on a modern day desktop, could have beat Kasparov. But we never saw such a match happen so it's just speculation to say any earlier engine than Deep Blue.
answered Feb 3 '19 at 19:57
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5Thanks for this. It seems according to the wiki that Deep Blue was running at 11.38 GFLOPS which is roughly the speed of a cheap PC these days. However it's not 100% clear Deep Blue was better than Kasparov. The match was controversial. – Anush Feb 3 '19 at 20:01
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8Note peak FLOPS and achieved FLOPS are very different things. And I'm not sure that FLOPS is actually a reasonable measure of performance in this case - Ian the HPC guy – Ian Bush Feb 3 '19 at 20:30
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1Yes, the match was controversial. If you don't accept that Deep Blue was superior though, you could select the next engine that beat a world champion in a match (there's a list in the wikipedia page on "Computer Chess"). – Inertial Ignorance Feb 3 '19 at 21:35
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8Deep Blue used significant amounts of custom hardware. It is not the answer to the question because it cannot "run on a standard desktop." – David Richerby Feb 4 '19 at 14:41
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3Due to the specific hardware used by Deep Blue I am not certain that the assumption about powerful holds. A 10 year old GPU can probably still outperform a modern CPU when rendering graphics. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Feb 4 '19 at 16:08
