Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?
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On February 10th, 1996, a computer program (IBM's Deep Blue) defeated the reigning chess champion (Garry Kasparov) in a game of chess for the first time. Deep Blue would go on to lose the match, but a year later, would get its revenge in a 3.5-2.5 rematch. In order to achieve this feat, IBM spent several million dollars on research and development building a special-purpose computer specifically for this purpose. Deep Blue itself (the victorious, upgraded version) was powered by 30 P2SC processors each running at roughly 120 MHz, and (most importantly) 480 custom VLSI chess co-processors used to perform chess-specific operations like move generation and position evaluation. When it was built, Deep Blue was the 259th most powerful supercomputer in the world, and could analyze over 200 million chess positions per second. But was Deep Blue necessary to beat Kasparov? Or could we have gotten away with an off-the-shelf 1996 desktop running a smarter chess engine? As it turns out, we could easily have beaten Kasparov without building Deep Blue, using only commodity hardware, and it (almost certainly) wouldn't have even been close. I know this because, as I write this very sentence, I have sitting next to me a 200 MHz Intel Pentium Pro (released exactly 31 years ago---November 1st, 1995) with 64MB of RAM running a custom port of Stockfish that plays at an estimated Elo of 3300 ± 87 at classical time controls---far beyond the strength of any human, or indeed Kasparov's Elo of just under 2800. But wait, there's more! I've hooked this machine up to the internet with a Realtek RTL8139C Ethernet card, so you can play it below! Connecting to the Pentium… wait, what?!
how??