Chapter 299 World Champion
As someone who had once worked in the Pandora Lab, Ye Rudai quickly understood the conversation between Su Yuanshan and Xi Xiaoding.
Back then, she had actually wanted to join the deep learning group—not to make any groundbreaking contributions, but simply to understand the mindset and thinking of those top-level researchers.
But once she tried dipping her toes in, she quickly realized she wasn't cut out for it.
Mastering algorithms wasn't that hard—if you had a solid grasp of high school and college-level mathematics, and if you'd studied the algorithm course compiled by Xi Xiaoding, it was pretty straightforward.
But to actually summarize and create new algorithms, especially in fields like machine learning…
That was a whole different story.
That was a domain for math prodigies.
"Pandora's chess program is finished?" she asked.
"Yeah, it's done," Su Yuanshan said with obvious delight after hanging up the phone.
"You know Xi and his team built a chess program that's completely different from normal ones, right?"
"Mhm! That's the difference between real artificial intelligence and artificial stupidity."
Ye Rudai grinned, then quickly added,
"That was Professor Xi's own wording."
"Haha! He nailed it.
Hey, do you want to come watch tomorrow?"
"Um... I'll pass. I've got class, and I still have data to analyze."
...
The two parted ways at the dormitory entrance.
Su Yuanshan returned home and told his father the good news.
Academician Su Xinghe was also pleased—but Su Yuanshan could tell that his father still hadn't fully grasped the implications.
"Dad, you're building a supercomputer, right?
How about building one just for playing chess?"
"For chess?"
Su Xinghe blinked.
"Yeah..." Su Yuanshan nodded.
"The school's current supercomputer is fast for integer calculations,
but its floating-point performance isn't that great.
Based on testing, it can only calculate about thirty million moves per second."
"Thirty million and that's not enough?"
Su Xinghe couldn't help laughing.
"You know what they say—man's greed is like a snake trying to swallow an elephant."
Su Yuanshan pouted.
He remembered clearly:
Deep Blue had used fewer than 500 low-frequency chips,
yet it had been custom-designed for chess and could analyze up to 200 million moves per second!
In this kind of deep learning task, single-precision floating-point performance is what really matters.
The school's supercomputer was powerful, yes—
but that power leaned heavily toward integer ops, thanks to its political undertones.
In practical AI applications, floating-point performance was where the real challenge lay.
"Thirty million is far from enough...
There are about two million recorded games in the world's chess databases.
To feed them all in for training, that's a massive project."
Su Xinghe realized his son wasn't joking and asked seriously,
"You're actually thinking of building a chess-specific supercomputer?"
"Do I look like I'm joking?" Su Yuanshan grinned.
"Dad, it seems like you're already falling behind in the world of algorithms...
The future of neural networks, deep learning, artificial intelligence—
It all starts with games like chess."
Su Xinghe pondered this for a moment, then nodded slowly.
"Now that you put it that way, it makes sense.
But building a supercomputer isn't something I can just do on my own.
We'd need to pursue a collaborative development model."
"That's fine. Let's talk about it later.
Once our CPU is ready, we'll rally the team again!"
"Heh, alright.
When the time comes, I'll shout the call."
...
The next afternoon, Su Yuanshan arrived at the supercomputing center.
Despite its name, "international chess" wasn't exactly a mainstream game in China.
It lagged behind Chinese chess in popularity—
a fact that reflected the country's slow but steady march toward "internationalization."
And yet, ironically, being a "foreign" game gave it an aura of prestige among certain groups.
Gu Xiaochun was China's reigning chess champion—
a serious contender who had ranked in the top five in international competitions.
This match was more of a friendly event—a test, really—
so Yuanxin hadn't made a big deal out of it.
Gu, for his part, also felt that this wasn't really a fair fight,
but Yuanxin had paid him, so he kept things low-key.
That's right—Gu already felt like this would be a "dishonorable win."
He had seen chess software before—he'd even played it on his old Subor learning console at home.
It was awful—clunky, slow, and dumb as a rock.
So when he heard that Yuanxin was fielding Asia's most powerful supercomputer,
he assumed it would just move faster—not smarter.
"Good afternoon, Professor Gu."
Su Yuanshan didn't introduce himself, just offered a simple greeting.
"Hello," Gu replied.
He was in his early thirties, seated calmly in front of the board, eyes closed in quiet focus.
Seeing Su greet him, he smiled politely.
"Professor Gu," Su Yuanshan continued, pulling up a chair next to Xi Xiaoding,
"I'm not great at chess, but I've heard that professional players can calculate ten moves ahead. Is that true?"
Gu looked momentarily stunned, then chuckled.
"Who told you that?"
"Wait… isn't that common knowledge?"
"Only the very best can calculate ten moves ahead.
Most players can't even get past eight.
And no matter what game we're talking about—chess, Chinese chess, Go—
these are pure games of intelligence.
There's a ton of unpredictability."
Su Yuanshan exchanged a glance with Xi Xiaoding, and the two of them smiled knowingly.
What Gu was really saying was this:
Sure, a computer might be good at math, but strategy games like chess?
That's human territory.
Intelligence was something only humans possessed.
Su Yuanshan nudged Xi.
"Senior Brother, have you played against Professor Gu yet?"
"Just one game—I didn't stand a chance," Xi said honestly, shaking his head.
Gu didn't know Su Yuanshan personally, but he recognized Xi Xiaoding—
chief scientist at Yuanxin and a professor at the Electronics Institute.
He was the real deal, a genius even.
Gu responded humbly,
"Professor Xi, you're too modest.
We each have our own specialties.
I've just played a lot of games—tens of thousands of them, probably."
Then, with a laugh, he added,
"If you sat down and played tens of thousands of games, you'd beat me easily."
"Tens of thousands, huh..." Su Yuanshan echoed thoughtfully.
Then he turned to Xi and asked,
"How many games has the AI learned?"
Xi glanced over at Gu and said casually,
"Time was tight, so...
Only around two hundred thousand games or so."
Two hundred thousand.
Gu's expression changed instantly.
He shot to his feet in shock.
"Impossible!"
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