ChipTest

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ChipTest was a 1985 chess playing computer built by Feng-hsiung Hsu, Thomas Anantharaman and Murray Campbell at Carnegie Mellon University. It is the predecessor of Deep Thought which in turn evolved into Deep Blue.

ChipTest was based on a special VLSI-technology move generator chip developed by Hsu. ChipTest was controlled by a Sun-3/160 workstation and capable of searching approximately 50,000 moves per second. In August 1987 ChipTest was overhauled and renamed ChipTest-M, M standing for microcode. The new version had ChipTest's bugs eliminated and it was also ten times faster, searching 500,000 moves per second and running on a Sun-4 workstation. ChipTest-M won the North American Computer Chess Championship in 1987.

Deep Thought 0.01 was created in May 1988 and the version 0.02 in November the same year. This new version had two customized VLSI chess processors and it was able to search 720,000 moves per second. With the "0.02" dropped from its name, Deep Thought won the World Computer Chess Championship with a perfect 5-0 score in 1989.