Brutus defeats Fritz in round four

11/24/2003 – Round four at the Computer Chess World Championship in Graz brought a first clash of the titans: the two leading programs, Fritz and Brutus, faced off with three points each on their scorecards. Running on eight parallel FPGA cards the hardware machine Brutus, programmed by Chrilly Donninger, overcame Fritz in an aggressive attacking game. Details...

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Brutus is the brainchild of the Austrian programmer and mathematician Dr Christian ("Chrilly") Donninger, pictured on the left after his victory over Fritz.

Donninger's program was constructed for Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) systems. These are essentially programmable chips which have the advantage is that anything programmed this way will run very much faster than on a general purpose chip like the Pentium or Athlon.

An additional benefit is that due to the parallel sturcture of the code you can add chess knowledge in any quantity without slowing down the search. In regular PC programs each new quantum of knowledge is bought at the price of search speed.
Round 1 – Nov 22, 2003
 Diep  Quark
1-0
 List  Shredder
0-1
 Chinito  Jonny
0-1
 Nexus  Parsos
draw
 Fritz  Falcon
1-0
 Deep Sjeng  Hossa
0-1
 Deep Junior  Ruy Lopez
0-1
 Green Light  Brutus
0-1
Replay and download games
Round 2 – Nov 23, 200
 Deep Sjeng  Fritz
0-1
 Jonny  Nexus
draw
 Quark  List
0-1
 Falcon  Hossa
1-0
 Parsos  Deep Junior
0-1
 Shredder  Diep
1-0
 Brutus  Ruy Lopez
1-0
 Green Light  Chinito
1-0
Replay and download games
Round 3 – Nov 23, 200
 Fritz  Shredder
1-0
 Jonny  Brutus
0-1
 Chinito  Parsos
1-0
 Diep  Falcon
draw
 Nexus  Deep Sjeng
0-1
 Ruy Lopez  Green Light
1-0
 Deep Junior  List
1-0
 Hossa  Quark
0-1
Replay and download games
Round 4 – Nov 24, 2003
 Quark  Chinito
0-1
 List  Nexus
1-0
 Falcon  Jonny
1-0
 Brutus  Fritz
1-0
 Parsos  Hossa
1-0
 Shredder  Green Light
1-0
 Deep Sjeng  Deep Junior
0-1
 Ruy Lopez  Diep
0-1
Replay and download games


The playing site in Graz. Once again we remind you that you do not need to change the settings of your monitor. The tournament is being held in a natural cave lit up by (artificial) green light.

Picture Gallery


GM Boris Alterman, responsible for the openings preparation of Deep Junior


ICGA president David Levy watching the game Deep Sjeng vs Deep Junior


Sjeng author Gian-Carlo Pascutto facing Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky of Junior


Frans Morsch looking plenty worried by the position of Fritz against Brutus


Rudolf Huber vs Steffen Jacob in the game Parsos vs Hossa


Thomas Meyer, author of the program Quark (German for curds)


Mr ICGA Prof. Jaap van den Herik


A modern camera-man: Matthias Wüllenweber of ChessBase moves around the tournament hall with a notebook and webcam to bring video images to the Playchess.com server.

All games are being transmitted live on the Playchess.com server. This includes audio commentary by GM Peter Wells and video impressions from the tournament hall.

In order to follow the games you can use Fritz or any Fritz-compatible program (Shredder, Junior, Tiger, Hiarcs) to follow the action, or download a free trial client here.

Links