Artificial intelligence

How often does chess make the front page of our local newspapers? Probably not more than two or three times within living memory. It is even rarer to find chess hitting the front pages of a local Chinese language newspaper but this actually happened in 1997 when the Guang Ming Daily reported on the match between Gary Kasparov and the IBM computer known as Deep Blue. 

The Guang Ming Daily or Kong Ming Yit Poh (光明日報) was formed from the closure of the Sin Pin Jit Poh (星檳日報) newspaper which was founded by the Singapore Tiger Balm king, Aw Boon Haw in 1939. Ten years earlier, Aw had also started the Sin Chew Daily (星洲日報). The Sin Pin Jit Poh had its headquarters in Leith Street, Penang. When it stopped publishing in 1986 following major management changes, the former staff of the newspaper launched the Guang Ming Daily in December 1987 with the help of Lim Keng Yaik who was then the Minister of Primary Industries. In 1992, the Rimbunan Hijau Group bought over Guang Ming Daily and thus making it the sister company of Sin Chew Daily again.

This particular historical connection aside, I discovered this page of the Guang Ming Daily of 13 May 1997 when going through my store room. 

The Deep Blue versus Kasparov matches were a pair of six-game chess matches involving a reigning world chess champion and an IBM supercomputer. Deep Blue was the successor to the original ChipTest and Deep Thought computers developed at the Carnegie Mellon University to research artificial intelligence. The rights to Deep Thought were later acquired by IBM and Deep Blue became the next iteration of a chess-playing super-computer. Kasparov won the first match against Deep Blue in Philadelphia in 1996 but a vastly improved Deep Blue v2 won the return match in New York a year later. This second match marked the first defeat of a reigning world chess champion by a computer in a match played under tournament conditions. Unfortunately, IBM chose to retire Deep Blue after the machine attained this landmark achievement. But the match received a lot of media attention worldwide and that was where the story was picked up even by a Chinese-language newspaper like Guang Ming Daily.