text: 4/2/2012 – Fifty years ago Bobby Fischer published a famous article, "A Bust to the King's Gambit", in which he claimed to have refuted this formerly popular opening. Now chess programmer IM Vasik Rajlich has actually done it, with technical means. 3000 processor cores, running for over four months, exhaustively analysed all lines that follow after 1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 and came to some extraordinary conclusions.
  For years Rybka dominated the computer chess scene. For years, no other program was able to achieve a similar increase in playing strength. For chess analysis Rybka has long become one of the most important analysis tools of professions and amateurs alike. So that this state of affairs will continue in the future, the Rybka-team gathered around programmer Vasik Rajlich has developed a new version which is even better: “Rybka 4 plays more aggressively and more tactically”.
  On March 31 the author of the Rybka program, Vasik Rajlich, and his family moved from Warsaw, Poland to a new appartment in Budapest, Hungary. The next day, in spite of the bustle of moving boxes and setting up phone and Internet connections Vas, kindly agreed to the following interview, which had been planned some months ago.
  Frederic Friedel: Vas, people have not heard much from you for a while. We know that you were working on an interesting project, and you promised to reveal details in the second quarter of 2012. So now please tell us: what’s been going on?
  Vasik Rajlich: Okay, here’s what we have been doing. You know that Lukas Cimiotti has set up a cluster of computers, currently around 300 cores, which has been used by World Champions and World Champion candidates to prepare for their matches. It is arguably the most powerful entity to play chess, ever, anywhere. Well, that was until we hooked it up to a massively parallel cluster of IBM POWER 7 Servers provided by David Slate, senior manager of IBM's Semantic Analysis and Integration department – 2,880 cores at 4.25 GHz, 16 terabytes of RAM, very similar to the hardware used by IBM's Watson in winning the TV show "Jeopardy". The IBM servers ran a port of the latest version of Rybka, and computation was split across the two clusters, with the Cimiotti cluster distributing the search to the IBM hardware.
  FF: So now you had an absurdly powerful chess playing system. What does one do with it? Playing against humans would not be sensible, and even other computers would be simply killed by it.