Pittsburgh, PA -- The $100,000 Fredkin Prize for Computer Chess, created
in 1980 to honor the first program to beat a reigning world chess champion,
will be awarded to the inventors of the Deep Blue chess machine Tuesday,
July 29, at the annual meeting of the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI) in Providence, R.I.

  Deep Blue beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov in the final game of a
tied, six-game match last May 11. Kasparov had beaten the machine in an
earlier match held in February 1996. The Fredkin Prize is being awarded
under the auspices of AAAI. The funds have been held in trust at Carnegie
Mellon University.

  The prize was established at Carnegie Mellon 17 years ago by Computer
Science Professor Edward Fredkin to encourage research in computer chess.
A prize of $5,000 was awarded to the first chess program to attain a
Master's rating in 1983. A prize of $10,000 was awarded to the system that
achieved Grandmaster status in 1988.

  Feng H. Hsu, Murray Campbell and A. Joseph Hoare, Jr. will split the
final, $100,000 award at a special chess pioneer recognition event that
will take place at the Westin Hotel in Providence. Five other research
teams that made groundbreaking technological contributions to the
development of computer chess also will be honored. The session will
include presentations explaining the contributions of each of these systems
to the chess-playing technology.

  Each team member will receive an Allen Newell Medal for Research
Excellence. The Newell Medal was created to honor the late Carnegie Mellon
computer scientist Allen Newell who, along with Nobel Laureate Herbert
Simon, co-founded the field of artificial intelligence and authored the NSS
chess program in 1958.

  "Like many other grand challenge problems in AI that have been with us
for a long time, chess has had a continuous and exciting history," said Raj
Reddy, dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon and
session chairman of the chess event. "It's wonderful to have this
opportunity to honor these pioneers. They engineered chess programs that
outclassed all other systems of their time. It is very appropriate that
AAAI honor them on this historic occasion."