Technology: Chess Prodigy $10,000 prize for a rising star

In just two weeks, the fastest-rising star in the world of chess won a major championship in Florida, trounced Danish grand master Bent Larsen and scored a sensational first-place tie with former British champion Tony Miles in a California tournament. Even more remarkable, the prodigy that achieved these triumphs is less than a year old. The prodigy is in fact a computer named Deep Thought.

For its performance on the chess circuit, Deep Thought has won the prestigious Fredkin Intermediate Prize for Computer Chess, a $10,000 award set up for the first computer to achieve a grand-master rating. The machine, designed by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, now has 2,551 points on the U.S. Chess Federation scale, making it one of the top 40 players in the U.S. and putting it within sight of world champion Gary Kasparov, who is rated at about 2,800.

Deep Thought was fine-tuned with the moves of 900 games played by human grand masters, but its real strength comes from two high-speed computer chips, plus a unique strategy that allows it to project 20 moves ahead along the most promising lines of play. How fast would a computer have to be to overtake + Kasparov? Some 100 to 1,000 times faster, says Feng-Hsiung Hsu, the Taiwan- born graduate student who designed Deep Thought's chips. "It's not out of the question, " says Hsu. "But it would take a few years."