The Paderborn University's Chess Program P.ConNerS wins a Chess Grand Master Tournament

Munich, July 20, 2000 The chess program P.ConNerS won last Sunday the 10th Lippstadt Grand Master Tournament. It ran on the Fujitsu Siemens hpcLine parallel computer of Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing (PC2). It used only 160 Intel Pentium processors out of the total of 192 processors.

This 10th Lippstadt chess tournament took place from July 5th to 16th in the old town hall. A chess computer, the Fujitsu Siemens hpcLine at PC2 at University Paderborn, and 11 Grand Masters fought against each other. The program P.ConNerS lost two times, against the junior world champion Slobodjan and the experienced British Grand Master Speelman. Over all it won the tournament with 6 victories and 3 remis.

This great success in such a high-level chess event. After the win of IBM's Deep Blue against Kasparow, a new milestone in computer chess is reached. The reactions of the human counterparts spread from acknowledgement to fright. The performance of the program was incredible. The program found solutions out of critical situations and surprised with sensational combinations, mentioned some of the human losers.

P.ConNerS was developed at University Paderborn in the working group of Professor B. Monien. The responsible scientist Ulf Lorenz developed within four years research a new, optimised method for foreseen planning. During the tournament the program used the Fujitsu Siemens parallel computer hpcLine. It has 96 dual Pentium boards, 196 processors in total. P.ConNerS used only 160. Within 1 second it computed and scanned through 3.5 to 5 million positions. Surely Ulf Lorenz as its developer will enter the annals of computer chess.

This activity demonstrates that the research topic "efficient usage of parallel computing" in Professor Monien's working group is not only theory or dry work in the laboratory but can influence the society.

All the chess tournament results and positions can be found at: http://people.freenet.de/lsvturm/gm2000.htm