IBM now regards chess-playing programs as so important to research into parallel processing that it has developed a chess co-processor for the RS/6000 for use with the Deep Thought II program developed at the Thomas J Watson Research Center. At Hannover this week it is showing Deep Thought II on an RS/6000 with 24 chess co-processors, competing against seven members of the German National Chess Team, six of whom are grandmasters. World champion Garry Kasparov will present the prizes. Deep Thought II can analyse 10m chess positions a second, 10 times faster than its predecessor.IBM is aiming for a 1,000-CPU system that can evaluate 1,000m positions per second.
