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Hmm, what was that tech from IBM deep blue, that apparently Google leveraged to such a degree?

Was it “machine learning”? If so, I don’t think that was actually the key insight for Google search… right? Did deep blue even machine learn?

Or was it something else?

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Deep Blue was the name of the computer itself rather than the software, but to answer your question - it didn't use machine learning, its program was written and tweaked by hand. It contained millions of different games and positions, and functioned by evaluating all possible moves at a certain depth. As far as I know, practical machine learning implementations wouldn't be a thing for a decent while after Deep Blue.

Wasn't that mostly a hardware problem? Both for research and implementation?

Circa-Deep Blue, we were still at Quake levels of SIMD throughput.

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