On Thu, Nov 8, 2018, 1:23 PM Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu wrote:

> Peter Adams, who photographed many Unix folks for his
> "Faces of open source" series (http://facesofopensource.com/),
> found trinkets from the Unix lab in the Bell Labs archives:
> http://www.peteradamsphoto.com/unix-folklore/.
>
> One item is more than a trinket. Belle, built by
> Ken Thompson and Joe Condon, won the world computer
> chess championship in 1980 and became the first
> machine to gain a chess master rating. Physically,
> it's about a two-foot cube.
>
> Doug
>

Furthermore, Feng-hsiung Hsu at CMU essentially put Belle on a chip and
parallelized it, resulting in the chess computer Deep Thought -- which
became the first machine to defeat a human Grandmaster. It lost a historic
match against the world champion Garry Kasparov, but its successor, Deep
Blue, went on to defeat him.

My favorite anecdote that I've read regarding Belle was when Ken Thompson
took it out of the country for a competition. Someone, I'm assuming with
customs, asked him if Belle could be classified as munitions in any way. He
replied, "Only if you drop it out the window."

>