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Deep Blue looks for a job

IBM is taking Deep Blue Jr. to Wall Street this week to demonstrate its skill at running financial applications.

Michael Kanellos Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Michael Kanellos is editor at large at CNET News.com, where he covers hardware, research and development, start-ups and the tech industry overseas.
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Michael Kanellos
2 min read
The Deep Blue chess whiz that stumped Garry Kasparov is ready to parlay its experience into a job on Wall Street.

IBM (IBM) will this week bring Deep Blue Jr., a specialized set of IBM's Deep Blue hardware and software running on a single IBM RS/6000 SP system, to the annual Securities Industry Association in New York. Deep Blue Jr. will show its prowess by, again, playing chess against human experts.

Deep Blue Jr. will take on Grand Master Joel Benjamin as well as various amateur chess players from the securities industry at the event. But, rather than play for the sheer fun of humiliating mankind, Deep Blue Jr. will play to show how the RS/6000 can be used for that numerical modeling applications that Wall Street relies on.

IBM is naturally trying to get mileage out of Deep Blue's well-publicized defeat of world chess champion Gary Kasparov in a tournament this past May. The company now wants to reap the rewards of the expensive and elaborate event, which set a whole new level of expectation for what a computer can achieve.

Deep Blue Jr. has already garnered support in the industry.

Algorithmics Incorporated, based in Toronto, has announced it will port its RiskWatch software to the RS/6000 SP platform. RiskWatch simulates financial scenarios so that traders can study complex cause and effect relationships in the financial world.

Similarly, Risk Management Technologies has devised a new version of its Genesis graphical data management tool and has enhanced the Transfer Pricing Engine of its Radar ProfitBuilder to run on RS/6000 SP.