Feng-hsiung Hsu is a computer architect whose work made Deep Blue possible. As a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1980s he designed special-purpose chess hardware - a project that started as a machine called ChipTest and grew into Deep Thought - and he carried that work to IBM, where it became Deep Blue. The custom chips he designed could evaluate chess positions far faster than general-purpose processors, letting the machine search hundreds of millions of positions per second.
In 1997 Deep Blue defeated reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match, the first time a computer beat a world champion under tournament conditions. Hsu, with Murray Campbell and A. Joseph Hoane Jr., documented the system in the paper “Deep Blue,” published in the journal Artificial Intelligence in 2002 and listed on IBM Research’s publications site.
Hsu’s contribution shows that the brute-force, hardware-driven branch of Claude Shannon’s 1950 vision - searching enormous numbers of positions rather than reasoning like a human - was the one that first toppled the world’s best human chess player. He later wrote a first-person account of the project in his book “Behind Deep Blue.”